


a duel of destinies

by ObviouslyAnonymous



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Devoted Reylo, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kylo Loves His Wife, Kylo Ren Needs a Hug, Kylo Ren Redemption, Rey Palpatine, So much angst, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, aka: read along as I fix JJ Abrams's mess, basically an angst fest, the slowest of burns, what if Rey was a Palpatine but it actually made sense?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-12-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:34:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 19
Words: 45,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22112683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObviouslyAnonymous/pseuds/ObviouslyAnonymous
Summary: “Where am I?” she asks, looking around the room and not seeing anything familiar. The forest on Takodana is gone. She’s on a First Order ship, or one of their bases, or even back on Exegol, in a room she doesn’t recognize. Trapped.“Does it matter? You’re my guest.”She looks down at the restraints and manages to muster some bravado that she definitely doesn’t feel. “If this is how you treat your guests, I think we have some work to do before we can have anyone over for dinner, husband.”***Rey was raised a Palpatine, granddaughter of the great Darth Sidious. And to his endless disappointment, Rey appeared all her childhood to be weak in the force. After a Force vision, the Emperor promises Rey's hand to a darksider named Kylo Ren. But all carefully laid plans are seemingly thrown to the wind when Rey escapes Exegol and flees to Jakku. Rewrite of the sequel trilogy.** REWRITE CURRENTLY IN PROGRESS, RELEASING Q1 OF 2021 **
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 244
Kudos: 654





	1. Paradise

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [landscape with a blur of conquerors](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11442951) by [diasterisms](https://archiveofourown.org/users/diasterisms/pseuds/diasterisms). 



> Haven't written any fanfic in years, but this concept kept me awake at night so I had to write it. Most of this is already plotted out, so new chapters will be frequent!

The unrelenting heat of the sun feels like a balm on Rey’s skin when she takes a step off of the personnel transport and onto the sands of Jakku. She can feel her skin tan and burn and there’s sand in her eyes, but compared to Exegol? Jakku is _paradise_. The heat feels like freedom. Both are barren, desert worlds, but where Exegol was barren and had an inescapable chill not entirely related to the cold, Jakku is warm and comparatively teeming with life and opportunity.

Perhaps, she thinks, in a few months the sand will get old. She figures she’ll leave when it does. Maybe settle on a planet with more water, maybe build herself a small house beside the ocean. But for now, Rey needs to be nowhere, she needs to be impossible to find.

Jakku, she was told by one pilot, is as close to nowhere as she’ll get. So she purchases two week’s worth of rations from a male Crolute named Unkar Plutt (who most definitely overcharges her) and she stalks into the desert, her eye on the shine of a downed Star Destroyer just beyond the horizon.

The walk to what’s left of the battlefield takes hours. She stops just briefly to take a spare robe out of her sack and rips it into pieces, wrapping her exposed skin until she looks like nothing but a grey blur on the barren landscape.

The debris looms high as she draws closer, heat rippling off of the metal in loose waves. The Star Destroyer is half sunk in the sand at an odd angle, leaving half the starboard side and the stern of the ship up in the air. With the angle of the sun, it casts a long shadow on the sand, and for a moment Rey considers camping on the sand but reconsiders when she thinks about the other scavengers, and the hungry way a pair of mercenaries looked at her in Niima. And, in her haste to explore, she neglected to purchase a flashlight, so venturing aboard the ship would have to wait until sunrise.

She walks for another kilometer before coming across the downed AT-AT. By this time the sun has gone down and she’s shivering as she makes her way through the sand. The metal of the auxiliary belly hatch is cool to the touch, and pulls open with a low groan. The interior is empty save for a few broken pipes and some debris, but it’s surprisingly free of sand.

When Rey falls asleep that night, curled up tight on the floor of the AT-AT, she does so with a smile. _I’m free._

Over the course of the next few months, Rey manages to make the AT-AT feel more like a home. She finds a mostly-functional speeder in the sand and hauls in barrels of water purchased with the credits she’s earned from trading her salvage with Plutt. A discovery of some coils of thick rope yields something that passes for a hammock. After days of tedious work, she even manages to find enough TIE fighter parts to make a functioning solar array, which powers a small stove and salvaged Y-wing flight computer.

It isn’t perfect, but this life is something that she made for herself, something _she_ created. Rey takes a quiet sort of pride in coming home to a place full of things she’s created. Even if they’re inefficient and cobbled together, they’re hers, and no one else’s.

Her days are spent scavenging and it is a trial and error process to learn which parts are more valuable than others, and it takes hours to find and clean her prizes. It’s a subsistence living but it feels good working with her hands, feels good walking through the sand dunes and climbing over the wreckage of her grandfather’s fallen empire.

She’s traversing through the corridors of the downed Star Destroyer, hoping to find some valuable part she hasn’t scavenged yet, when the Force seems to shift, and the creaking of the ship stops. She turns, sensing something new, something strange.

Then she sees him.

Kylo Ren stands half a dozen paces in front of her. The first thing she notices are the dark bags under his eyes. Rey wonders, briefly, if she is the cause of his restlessness, wonders what punishment the Emperor inflicted on him after her escape. There are no bruises on any of the exposed skin she can see, but he’s wrapped up in a cowl and armor and Palpatine was never one for leaving bruises where others could see, anyway. He had never wanted to damage her pretty face.

They stand for a moment in shocked silence and staring at each other. She reaches out in the Force, senses that he’s both there and not there. She asks,“Are you doing this, or is it the bond?”

“I— no.” For a moment he looks as shocked as she does before he manages to school his expressive features into something closer to determination. “Tell me where you are, Rey.”

She pauses, takes a moment to consider.

She’s deep in the depths of the Star Destroyer, lit only by her flashlight. If he could see her surroundings, the darkness might mean she’s not completely compromised. But how well does Kylo Ren know the Empire’s history? Would he be able to identify what planet she’s on based only on the dimly lit corridor of a Star Destroyer? She’s not sure. The fact that she can’t see his surroundings, she supposes, is a good sign that he can’t see hers.

She wonders if he’d tell the truth if she were to ask.

“I don’t think I will,” she replies, taking a step back. “Can you see my surroundings? I don’t see yours.”

He doesn’t respond, instead outstretching his arm and reaching his hand towards her. “ ** _You will tell me where you are_.**” It’s a demand, and she can hear in his voice that he intended to have the full strength of the Force behind it. She doesn’t feel so much as a tingle.

“So we can’t see the other’s surroundings and we can’t use the Force to manipulate each other,” she muses, before adding with a sly grin: “maker, that’s inconvenient for you.”

The sound that leaves his chest is something between a growl and a snarl. The sly grin falls from her face as Kylo stalks towards her, forcing her to backpedal into a wall before crowding her in with both palms planted on either side of her. One gloved hand reaches out to grip her chin, jerking her head to look up at him.

She wonders if she imagines it when she feels his finger reach out and run over her lips, just once. It’s too soft a gesture to fit the man in front of her.

“You made a _vow_ to me, Rey, remember?” His voice is eerily calm and his grip unyielding.

She can feel the anger roll off of him in thick waves through the bond. He almost sounds betrayed, she realizes. It is as if he thought the vows they exchanged were _real_ , were something more meaningful than her grandfather selling her like chattel to his apprentice in exchange for the promise of a dynasty. The thought is quickly dismissed, because she knows Kylo Ren, she knows he’s a monster.

“Tell. Me.” His grip tightens just a fraction as he enunciates each word with precision. “Where. You. Are.”

“No.” She says softly, her voice a half-whisper as she looks up into his eyes that seethe with renewed fury, “no, you’ll just take me back.” The idea sends a wave of fear curling into her gut, wrapping its tendrils around her lungs and her heart. Suddenly her heart is in her throat and she can barely breathe _and where did all the air go?_

Her first instinct is to be overwhelmed by the fear, but her time on Exegol taught her that fear is only a tool. _Things, and people, Palpatine once told me, are only as useful in so far as they can be used for one’s own gain._ As it grows, the fear is transformed into something darker, something more powerful, and she wraps it around herself like armor, lets it fill her up. She places both hands on his chest, pushes him back and snarls at him.

Kylo stumbles backwards several steps, and this time it is he that backpedals into a wall and she that stalks forward.

“I am _never_ going back to Exegol,” she hisses, and he opens his mouth to respond just as he abruptly disappears. She couldn’t explain it, afterwards, but she could feel herself slamming the bond shut, could feel herself wield the Force and manipulate the bond between them in a way she’s never done before.

And as she climbs down the wreck of the Star Destroyer and navigates through the sand dunes, she finds herself looking down at her hands, wondering if something new has awoken inside her. Her grandfather had always expressed great disappointment that her connection to the Force was so weak, that she was just a useless little girl, but as Rey walked back to her AT-AT, she wondered if perhaps he might’ve been wrong.


	2. Denial

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo Ren attacks Tuanul village and Rey has a chance encounter with a droid.

As the First Order personnel transport makes its descent into the Tuanul village, Kylo Ren’s thoughts turn to his fugitive wife. A direction his thoughts were taking with increasing frequency of late.

Since the Force had brought them together three days ago, he has been distracted. He kept thinking about the fire in her eyes, the vicious look on her face when she snarled at him. Most of all, he thought of her adept use of the Force bond to block him out. He had been reaching for her, eager to see her again ever since she cut him off. It was a kind of longing he wasn’t familiar with until he had met her, seen her for the first time on Exegol. Now his mind kept replaying what his lips had felt like on his own when they had kissed during the ceremony, the way her hair felt when he ran it through his fingers, how _soft_ she was. He was going mad. He was sure of it.

His efforts at reaching out to her through the Force were like running headfirst into a brick wall. Her mental shields were stronger than he would have thought possible for someone untrained and supposedly weak in the Force. Rey kept surprising him at every turn, proving herself increasingly capable of evading capture and evading _him_. It would bristle at his ego if he wasn’t so impressed.

The Emperor had said his granddaughter wasn’t a Force user, that he had tested her time and time again and she had always failed. Kylo was beginning to have his doubts. He knew it was dangerous to question the Emperor, but Darth Sidious wasn’t omniscient. It was entirely possible that her connection to the Force was only now beginning to manifest.

When the Emperor had given him Rey’s hand, he had promised Kylo a dynasty. The Emperor had said he had a Force vision, said that together, he and Rey would destroy the Jedi and found an empire that would last for a thousand years. It was an offer Kylo couldn’t refuse, didn’t _want_ to refuse, the perfect way to keep the promise he made to his grandfather.

_I will finish what you started._

He was so close to fulfilling his destiny he could almost _taste_ it, could almost feel the throne beneath him. It only amplifies the frustration he feels at Rey’s resistance. They would be _devastating_ together, an unstoppable force.

They land, and Captain Phasma gives the order for her squadron of Stormtroopers to join the advance team that has already begun the attack on the village. Kylo stands, and walks off the ship, passing through the heavy wind and smoke. Blaster fire criss crosses what was once a village turned battlefield. Casualties of war lie in pools of blood. Necessary sacrifices for progress.

Across the field he sees Lor San Tekka, both of his arms taken by a pair of stormtroopers who are pulling him forward. He walks with a certain air of elegance despite it, as though the stormtroopers are but escorts guiding him to a high-level diplomatic talk as opposed to the interrogation they both know will end in his death.

“Look how old you’ve become,” Kylo says, taking in the deep-set wrinkles on his weathered face and the outrage in Lor San Tekka’s eyes. He examined the old man, as one might a relic in a museum, a remnant of a man clinging to a bygone era.

“Something far worse has happened to you.” Tekka says. There is something resembling pity in his gaze, as if he is remembering the man that Kylo used to be.

He was a boy when Lor San Tekka knew him, dejected and quiet and _weak_. Kylo was the future, the only viable way forward, this withered old man was the past personified. “You know what I’ve come for.”

“I know where you come _from_.” Tekka’s unconcerned and endlessly patient tone grated on him with an unexpected fierceness. It reminded him of his uncle. “From a time before you called yourself Kylo Ren.”

Kylo growled behind the mask, and it came out of the modulator sounding more animal than human. “ _Careful_. The map to Skywalker. I know you’ve acquired it. And now you’re going to give it to me.”

“You don’t belong with them.” Tekka said calmly, one last feeble attempt to bring him into the light. His tone was matter-of-fact, but there was desperation beneath it. This was Tekka’s last hope. “The First Order arose from the dark side. You did not.”

Kylo’s last thread of patience snapped. “How is it possible that a conversation becomes so tedious, so quickly?” He swept his arm out, gesturing towards the village that was quickly becoming engulfed with fire. To his right, stormtroopers stood watch over a herd of scared villagers. “Don’t turn a simple transaction into a tragedy for these people. Haven’t you done enough for them already?”

“I made my peace with these people and this place long ago. You turning away from your heritage is the _true_ tragedy here.”

Kylo gritted his teeth behind the mask. He leaned forward. “Enough witless banter.” He held out a hand. “Old man, give it to me.”

When Lor San Tekka didn’t immediately respond, Kylo began to reach into his mind, extending his will through the Force to pry into the old man’s thoughts. There was a wall there, something old that an experienced Force user must have helped him create. It would take him too much time to break it down. So many delays. It ate at his control.

Tekka seemed to notice Kylo’s attempted intrusion. “You may try,” He said, with a quiet sort of defiance, “but you cannot deny the truth that is your family.”

Exasperation makes way to rage, and reason evaporates in the presence of his fury. He doesn’t even notice when he grabs his lightsaber, removes it from the belt at his side. It’s so easy to ignite it, barely even a thought, and the crackle and dull roar of the crimson blade is a familiar sound.

“You’re so right.”

* * *

Poe sees the saber come to life. He had only seen them in holovids, before, and they are wholly inadequate preparation for what it’s like to see one up close. The blade is light itself, hissing with a life of its own. The dark masked figure’s blade isn’t like the one in the holovids. It has the same long blade, this one red. A mark of the Sith. Two unusual smaller projections, cross-guards, emerge from the hilt.

It is a killer’s weapon, that much he knows. A thing belonging to someone who enjoys inflicting pain unto others.

Thoughts are racing through his mind in slow motion as he watches the crimson blade cut through the air, forming a lethal arc towards Lor San Tekka’s kneeling form. He’s powerless from back here. But maybe not entirely powerless?

He rises, hears himself yelling as he raises his blaster and fires. But it’s too late, too slow, not enough. He should have done nothing, he was _rash_ and _stupid_ and now he is sure to meet the same fate as Lor San Tekka. Tekka’s torso has been bisected, both halves bleeding out onto the sand.

The masked stranger raises one hand, palm up, and freezes the blaster discharge in midair. Frozen in time.

The helmet turns towards him.

* * *

Green slab-stuff sizzles on Rey’s stovetop, and she carefully turns it over with a makeshift pair of tongs, frying it until it has darkened around the edges. She empties a packet of beige powder in another pan, adding a small amount of water and giving it one quick stir before it expands and solidifies into a loaf. She places both on her plate, adding in some foraged scrubroot and desert plums to round out the meal.

Rey knows she could live off the rations she earns with her scavenge, but she likes having a stockpile of reserves, so she only eats one meal a day. Her foraged goods give her another way to pass the time and serve the additional benefit of adding more bulk to her food stores. The desert plums are her favorite, the dry cracked shell of the fruit breaking opening to reveal the sweet and juicy insides.

They are relatively uncommon finds— desert plums only grow in sandy soil that has a certain amount of moisture in it. Rey has a small container with sand and desert plum seeds that she’s been watering for almost a month now. The crop is slow and proving to be an unnecessary drain on her water reserves instead of the beginning of a self-sustaining food supply. She’d wait another week or two before tossing the project, just in case. The ability to grow her own food would mean she wouldn’t be as reliant on the income from her meager salvage for basic necessities. With the extra credits, she could purchase parts for her solar array, or a bed instead of a hammock.

She sits on her hammock and dives into her meal. She’s hungry, her appetite the result of working overtime the past several days to clear her head of _him_.

She licks the plate clean after finishing her meal and sets the plate aside. Washing dishes is a waste of water she can’t afford. Rey exits the belly of the AT-AT and makes her way outside into the rapidly cooling Jakku air. Sunset is quickly approaching, and cooler temperatures still would follow. Rey walks alongside the fallen leg of the AT-AT and lays down in the shadow its foot creates. Picking up an old, badly damaged Rebellion helmet, she puts it on. The shaded visor makes staring at the dunes far less strenuous on her eyes which are still used to the all-consuming darkness of Exegol.

She sits and watches through the helmet as the signature contrail of a single ascending ship streaks across the Jakku sunset, a beautiful sight of pink and bright coral clouds layered over a pale blue sky, with the sun painting the lower quarter of the horizon a vibrant golden yellow. After witnessing the first sunset on Jakku, Rey made it a habit to watch the sunset every night. It was the desert world’s best feature.

Sunset was fading into night when she hears something something chirp and squeal over the next dune. Rey throws off the helmet and whirls back into her AT-AT, coming out a split second later with her quarterstaff in hand. The beeping was growing in frequency, erratic and loud.

She keeps her footsteps light as she runs across the sand, and stops when she reaches the peak of the dune a bird’s eye view of the sight below. It was a droid that was chirping so loud, trapped in a net of organic material, attempting to escape its newfound prison. A difficult endeavor, considering it doesn’t have any limbs. The attempted kidnapper is a native Teedo, sitting astride a squat, four-footed, helmeted luggabeast. The Teedo is struggling to reel the droid in with its constant movement, cursing and hissing at the droid for its insubordination.

Rey had staked the area around her AT-AT as her territory, and thus had a right to stop and question any trespassers. In her first week on Jakku she defended herself from no less than two attacks by local scavengers who didn’t appreciate her arrival and decided that her pretty face would fetch them a few hundred credits if they sold her to slavers. If she didn’t act here and now, the locals would get even more brazen.

 _“Tal’ama parqual!”_ She shouts. It catches both by surprise. The Teedo and the droid stop their wrestling and look up at her. “ _Parqual! Zatana tappan-aboo!_ ”

The Teedo yells something vicious and threatening back at her through the mouthpiece of its goggle-eyed helmet. The hovering head of the droid, a BB-8 model, swivels rapidly back and forth, trying to watch both Rey and the Teedo at the same time.

Rey grits her teeth, outraged and offended at the Teedo’s tone and speech, which was a flagrant violation of the courtesy that existed between fellow scavengers and desert-dwellers, the kind of courtesy that made coexistence possible. Those who were strong enough to defend themselves and their territory were the only survivors on Jakku, and that bred a kind of grudging respect between fellow survivors. A respect that this Teedo had just violated.

That was _it_. Rey surges forward, drawing her knife and hacking away at the netting. The Teedo unleashes a torrent of curses at her, but she is of a single mind until the native hisses a slur that is vile in any language.

She pauses, rising up and slowly turning to face it. “ _Noma. Ano tamata, zatana._ ” Her voice is deathly quiet as she makes the promise. Behind its goggles she can see the Teedos eyes widen. She backs away from the Teedo and its mount and points to some far off dune, gesturing for it to go.

“ _Namago_.” She says, and the Teedo turns and flees.

As soon as it was far enough away, Rey turns to the droid, who moves as if to call insults and challenges after the Teedo.

“Shhh,” she whispers, “don’t tempt him to come back.” BB-8 instantly goes silent, and they watch the mount and its rider until they vanish over the dunes. The droid chirped an electronic query, and Rey turned to it.

“He’s just a Teedo. A local. Wanted you for parts, I think.” Something out of place draws Rey’s gaze on the top of the droid’s head. “Your antenna’s bent,” she says, taking it between two fingers and working out the kinks until it’s mostly straight again.

She can’t help but notice that the droid is relatively clean, almost shining, despite some sand and the occasional scratch. It’s unusual for a droid to be alone on Jakku, and a droid in such a pristine condition as this one, wandering alone? Unheard of.

“Where’d you come from?” Rey asks curiously, and the droid beeps a long reply. She smiles broadly. “Oh, Classified. Really? Me too,” she winks conspiratorially. “Big secret.”

She rises, and starts back towards her home. “I’ll keep my secret and you can keep yours.” She gestures to the south. “Niima Outpost is that way. Be sure to stay off Kelvin Ridge and keep away from the Sinking Fields up in the north or you’ll drown in the sand. The closer you get to Niima, the less likely you are to run into another Teedo.”

BB-8 beeps, softly pleading, and starts to follow her. She closes her eyes and sighs, gnawing on her tongue inside of her mouth as she considers.

“You really shouldn’t follow me. The sooner you leave, the sooner you can be reunited with whomever it is you’re looking for.” The droid moans dejectedly and another noise, a long and drawn out beep that sounds remarkably like ‘ _ppllleeeaaassee_?’ and Rey huffs in response.

“ _Fine_.” She says, with an exasperated sigh. The droid chirps happily, rolling around in the sand in glee. “But in the morning, you go.” A quick affirmative beep acknowledges her decision as it straightens itself out and follows her. Then another beep, a polite request. “Alright, I’ll go to Niima with you. I have some salvage to pawn there anyway.”

The droid chirps, and she laughs. “Yes, there is a lot of sand here. Beebee-Ate? Alright. Hello, Beebee-Ate. My name is Rey.” BB-8 beeps, a quick question. “No family name.” She says. “Just Rey.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kylo is a bit obsessed with his wife and I am 200% here for it.
> 
> Thanks to Riverrah for being an absolutely stellar beta! 
> 
> Your comments and support for this story keep me going! We're approaching more moments where we'll begin to diverge further from the canon, so stay tuned...


	3. Escaping Jakku

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm on fire right now! Can't promise updates this frequent when my semester starts up again, but in the meantime, here's the third chapter. Fourth chapter will hopefully be up before next week!

Niima Outpost is more a haphazard collection of buildings and huts that follows no clear organizational system or logic than a proper town. It is a junkyard settlement first and foremost, named after Niima the Hutt who capitalized on the new scavenging opportunities in the area after the Battle of Jakku. Over time, the outpost grew in size, with some scavengers building huts and making the Niima Outpost their permanent home.

“ _Order_ ” is imposed by the Niima Outpost Militia. Rey knows from experience that they’re little more than scavengers turned thugs who claimed jurisdiction only on crimes they want to investigate. They’re easily bribed, and operate out of a rusty shack on the perimeter of the Outpost. She had gone to them for help when the local scavengers had tried to kidnap her the first time, but after a quick conversation and no less than two sexual innuendos, they had proven themselves useless.

The largest feature of the Outpost was Bay Three, a large docking bay whose primary inhabitants were rusting, garbage ships like that big Corellian freighter Unkar Plutt owns. It’s just sitting in the sand, waiting for collapse. A few ships offered passage off-world, and she tells BB-8 that much when she unloads him from her speeder.

“There’s a trader in Bay Three, goes by the name of Horvins. Don’t be put off by his appearance—he’s a pretty decent sort. He was the one that brought me here. Might be willing to give you a lift, wherever you’re going. So…” Rey pauses a beat, considering, then gives the droid a sad smile. She’d miss him once he was gone, her first real friend in and out of her life in under a day. “Goodbye.”

She had only taken barely a handful of steps when a series of beeps made her look back to BB-8 and laugh. “Now you can’t leave? What happened to finding Mr. Classified? I thought you had somewhere special to be.”

The droid’s response is anxious, a melancholy sort of sound that catches her off guard. She walks back towards him and kneels down, giving him a half-smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “He might still show up, Beebee-Ate. You shouldn’t give up yet. Believe me, I know all about waiting.”

The droid beeps out a question.

“I was…” she searches for the right words. “Held against my will. For a long time. I waited years for the perfect moment to escape.”

The electronic response is shocked, curious. It moves as close to her as protocol permits. “Yes, I _chose_ to escape to Jakku. When you’re trying to not be found, Jakku is the perfect place to be. Now come on, let’s go find your master.”

She stands, and the droid is close at her heels. Before they could search around town, Rey has some business to attend to. She drags her pile of salvage behind her, all thrown together in the same type of local organic mesh netting that the Teedo had used when it tried to capture the droid.

Hauling the salvage over to the Plutt’s Concession Stand is slow moving, she has a lot of parts in the bag. The droid helps where it can, pushing the bag from the rear to lighten her load. They make an odd pair, she thinks, but she can’t help but like the droid. He’s a sweet little thing.

They make some light conversation as the two of them wait in line. BB-8 scans around, searching for his master or any of his known associates.

“Tell me who we’re looking for, Beebee-Ate.”

The droid beeped out a response she had been hearing a lot of lately. _Classified_.

“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me who we’re looking for. Can you trust me?”

The droid paused. Thinking, or low on power? She wasn’t sure. Then, finally, he beeps out a quick description. Human male. Handsome. Dark hair, tan skin. Wears a dark brown leather jacket.

“Good,” she tells him. “That narrows things down.”

Then it’s her turn at the front, and she resists the urge to gag as Unkar gestures her forward and she catches a strong whiff of his odor. Maybe one day, before the universe died, Unkar Plutt would take a bath.

The Crolute inspects her salvage, and makes a show of it by continually frowning and acting as if her valuable pieces are common and not noteworthy. This time, his attention is drawn to the droid at her side. She can tell from his shrewd gaze that he’s interested.

“I’ll give you one quarter portion for the two interlifts.” He says finally, and she draws back. “A quarter? Last week they were a half portion each, and you said you wanted more.”

The merchant’s flesh ripples with a grotesque smile. “Conditions have changed. What about the droid?”

“What about him?”

“I’ll pay for him.”

BB-8 begins to beep apprehensively from behind her. He’s not liking the direction the conversation it taking _at all_. She recognizes the sound, similar to the one he made when the Teedo was attempting to capture him. Rey glances down at him once before turning back to Plutt.

“The droid’s not for sale.” She says, surprising even herself with how forceful she sounded. But BB-8 was the first thing she’d been able to call a _friend_ in, well, forever.

Plutt tries again. He’s practically drooling, but trying hard not to show it. “Of what use is the droid to you? It has no service limbs.”

“Maybe I enjoy the company.”

“I’ll pay sixty portions for it.”

Sixty portions would feed her for… for a very long time.Long enough to get the credits to start her own garden. Long enough to save for a bed. She’d have time to relax.

She’s silent for long enough that BB-8 starts beeping furiously, nudging her behind and jerking her out of her thoughts.

“Like I said,” the word physically hurt to say. “The droid’s not for sale.”

Unkar’s mouth twitches, turning into a furious frown. She feels something ooze from him, Like a scent carried on a breeze, his thoughts drift into her mind without her asking, just briefly, just long enough for her to hear them.

_The First Order is offering a fortune for that droid. If they discovered I had it within my grasp and let it get away… I’ll get that droid. At any cost._

Her eyes widen, and she stares at Plutt in shock. His lips hadn’t moved. She had heard his thoughts? No. Impossible.

But she had. And he was thinking that he’d take BB-8 by force if he had to. Would likely send his mercenaries after her to take him.

Trying not to panic, she hurries away from the stand, her salvage forgotten, and ushers BB-8 through the busy marketplace and into an empty stall. There isn’t time to consider the fact that she had just read a being’s thoughts or the fact that her life is now in danger because she wouldn’t give up a droid she barely knows. There is only the current crisis, the task at hand. Her first order of business is getting the two of them off the planet and out of danger. Hiding in here might buy them a few moments.

“Listen to me, Beebee-Ate,” her tone is rushed, hurried, she’s counting down the seconds she thinks they might have before they’re found. “You need to get out of here, and you need to do it now. Finding your master is just going to have to wait. Plutt isn’t going to take no for an answer, and I think the First Order might be hot on your trail.”

The droid beeps rapidly, alarmed and confused and afraid. She stares at the droid in disbelief.

“You’re with the _Resistance?!?_ Yes, I’ve heard of them. That explains why the First Order is after you.” Shock is quickly replaced by fear. Kylo Ren. He has a lot of power in the First Order, accountable only to Supreme Leader Snoke himself.

Would he come to her backward little planet in search of a droid? She isn’t sure. The droid won’t say anything about it’s secret mission. But she knows she can’t leave BB-8 alone and to his own devices. His best chance at escape is with her help. She just hopes she can do it without losing the home she’s made for herself here on Jakku in the process.

She sighs, half hating herself for the determination she feels, and her loyalty to a droid she barely knows. “Come on, stay close. We don’t have a lot of time.”

She stands, begins to trace a weaving path through the crowd. Then, suddenly, someone crashes into her. She grabs their shoulders to steady herself, feels the leather underneath her fingers. Leather. The droid said it’s master wore a leather jacket.

The stranger’s expression is frantic, afraid. He tries to wrench himself away from her and keep running.

Then she notices the stormtroopers racing after him, their blasters drawn. She lets him go. Then thinks better of it, and she and BB-8 race after him.

“Hey!” She yells after the man in the leather jacket. “Wait!”

“Get out of the way!” One of the stormtroopers says from behind her, coming up fast from behind.She grits her teeth as a plan forms in her mind. She doesn’t like it. It’s not a very good plan.

The stormtroopers are close behind her, one on either side. At the last possible moment, she takes her quarterstaff and holds it out horizontally at her waist and _pushes_ it back. It collides with both stormtroopers, knocking them off their feet and onto the sand. Two quick movements renders them both unconscious. She relieves them of their blasters, tucking one on her belt.

BB-8 chirps, obviously impressed.

She grins, and runs after the stranger in the leather jacket. She finds him in a large covered tent full of junk. Nervous but determined, she aims the blaster at the center of his chest. She hopes he doesn’t make her use it. She doesn’t want to hurt anyone.

He doesn’t expect it, looks at the blaster in her hands with wide eyes. He’s unarmed.

Glaring at him, she asks, “Where did you get that jacket? The droid says you stole it, says it belonged to his master.”

Clearly stunned, the stranger backs away from her blaster, holds up his hands. “Whoa whoa whooaah! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” Then he notices the droid beside her, and realization dawns on his face. “You’re Poe’s droid,” he says. “His name was Poe Dameron, right?”

BB-8 stays silent.

“He was captured by the First Order,” the stranger continues quickly. “I helped him escape. Defected from the Stormtroopers. Broke him out of his holding cell. We stole a TIE fighter together, did some damage to their Star Destroyer. We couldn’t flee out-system, he said, because we had to find you.”

A soft, almost mournful beep.

“We got shot down. I got out…” His face falls, his eyes look wetter than they did a few moments ago. “He didn’t. I tried to help him, I really tried, but this sand sucked the ship right down. It would have taken me with it. I’m sorry…”

She _feels_ rather than _sees_ the droid crumple. He rolls slowly to a far corner of the tent, and she watches the little droid go. She thinks BB-8 would cry, if he could.

She addresses the stranger without taking her eyes off of the mourning droid. “You’re sure he’s dead?”

Clearly shaken, he nods. “Poe was unconscious before we crashed, and with the sand… I don’t think anyone could have survived that.”

Rey runs through his story again in her head, and narrows her eyes at him. “I’ve never heard of a stormtrooper defecting before. You escaped a First Order ship _and_ stole a TIE fighter, all after defecting?” It sounds maybe a bit too good to be true.

The stranger runs a hand over his face, looking worn out and a bit sheepish. “I thought about lying to you, saying I was with the Resistance… but something about you tells me that you would have known I wasn’t telling the truth. I think I want to join them though, the Resistance. I owe Poe a life debt, I have to pay it back.”

She studies him intently. Tries to recreate what happened when she had read Plutt’s thoughts, but nothing happens. She purses her lips. He seems sincere enough. If it turns out he really is lying, she thinks she’d be able to subdue him. Against her better judgment, she takes the chance.

“The tent won’t hide us for long,” she says. “And BB-8 says he’s on a secret mission, and with the First Order on his tail he needs to get off-planet, and fast.”

She peeks outside of the tent, and sees six stormtroopers heading their way.

“ _Kriff_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay tuned for our favorite garbage ship and a scene next chapter where Kylo runs after his wife and they have a t e n s e Force Time moment


	4. Classified

All around them, Niima Outpost has been thrown into complete chaos. Explosions from the TIE fighters that had been called in have torn tents, buildings, and _people_ apart. The sand is drenched in blood, and debris blocks their way at every turn. Merchants, traders, scavengers, and every other innocent bystander is running, stampeding over each other in a desperate search for safety.

Rey, BB-8, and the stranger in the jacket whose name she really needs to ask for run through it all. They are making a frantic run for Bay Three, the ship docking station. It’s no more than a sand-scoured clearing, devoid of all cover, making them perfect targets for TIE fighter tracking systems, but it’s their best hope.

“We can’t outrun them!” the stranger yells over the roar of the screams and the ship engines.

Rey points to the four-engined blue craft that lies dead ahead. “We might in that quadjumper!”

He catches up to her quickly and shakes his head as they run. “I’m a gunner, we need a pilot!”

“We got one!” She says back, breathless and gesturing at herself.

He gapes at her, slowing down. “ _You?_ ”

Rey’s irritation at his tone nearly stops her dead-cold. “Are you really underestimating me right now? Because I _really_ don’t like being underestimated!”

“What? No! No! Sorry! How about that ship, over there? It’s closer!” He points to another craft that looms off to their right, considerably closer than the quadjumper. It’s covered under a large tarp.

She doesn’t even have to look to know which ship he’s pointing to. “That one’s garbage! We need something that’ll _move_!”

Just as she says it, two TIE fighters roar past them overhead and direct their fire at their destination. The quadjumper explodes in a ball of flame, flinging debris in all directions. Nothing is left but a smoking pile of rubble.

Rey reacts immediately, turning even as she shields her face from the heat of the blast. “Nevermind! The garbage will do!”

Rey thanks the Maker that the loading ramp is down. The three of them race inside. She dashes towards the cockpit, doesn’t even look for the stranger behind her as she points to his position. “Gunner’s position is down there!” she says, running and flinging herself into the pilot’s chair as she activates the controls. To her surprise, the console immediately comes to life.

She throws her headset on, turning on her comm, and hears the tell-tale electronic noise of the stranger doing the same. “What’s your name, stranger?”

“Finn!” he replies quickly, and she hears him turning on controls in the gunner’s seat.

On her end, she’s running rapidly through a standard pre-lift sequence, fingers flying over the console. “Well Finn, I’m Rey! And this might not be a great time to let you know, but I’ve only ever flown once in real life and I crash-landed, but here’s to hoping for a better second go of things!”

“ _What?!?_ ” Finn practically screams, just as the long-dormant engines of the ship roar to life and the ship takes off, careening wildly as Rey tries to shed the tarps that cover the ship.

She just about crashes into the ground, and Finn is screaming over the comms that he’s going to die, but she manages to level off just in time to slam into and through the town’s entry archway.

As time goes on, Rey finds the craft surprisingly responsive to manual control. She spins it around a few times and accelerates, blasting away from the docking station, and the two TIE fighters that terrorized Niima come careening towards them.

“Stay low! It’s our only chance, it messes with their tracking! We need to lose them before we go extra-atmospheric or they’ll outmaneuver us, run us down before we can even make lightspeed— assuming this old crate can still do lightspeed. Are the shields up?”

Rey leans over just as he says it, momentarily letting go of the controls to stretch over to the other end of the cockpit and flip the switch. Her stretching makes the ship cant wildly, and Finn screams until she returns to her place in the pilot’s seat. “Now they are!” She says, and he curses.

“Are you _sure_ you know how to fly?”

“I’ve done thousands of simulations!” She shouts, “It can’t be that hard! Hang on, I’m going low!”

Driving the ship surfaceward, she pulls up at the last possible second and they clip the crests of two dunes. The two TIE fighters, unable to match the maneuver and slow in time to effectively pursue them, shoot past their ship. Each fighter, however, manages to get off a shot, and they burst against the shields. The two blasts might have brought them down had the vessel’s shields not been up.

 _Tougher than it looks_ , Rey thinks, accelerating and heading toward the Graveyard of the Giants, hoping the wreckage of the Super Star Destroyers might give them enough cover to lose the two First Order ships.

A blast rocks them just as they pass over a sandstone monolith, and Rey yells as loud as she can, “Are you asleep down there, Finn? We could really use some offense! Maybe before our body parts are scattered all over the desert?”

“I’m working on it!” Finn calls back, and BB-8 beeps a scathing response as he rolls up the ceiling.

A moment later, Rey notices Finn begin firing back at their pursuers as another blast rocks the ship. Rey thanks her lucky stars for whoever owned this ship, as the robust shields that are currently saving her life are undoubtedly the result of some _very_ illegal modifications.

Rey banks the ship hard, low enough to cut a crease in the sand, and Finn manages to get one good shot in, bringing down one TIE fighter just as Rey pilots the ship into the wreckage of the Super Star Destroyer.

“Nice shot!” she yells into the comm, grinning and pumped full of adrenaline. One down, one more to go.

Sparks fly as the ship grazes towering metal walls and fallen station sections from the inside of the enormous vessel. Rey looks at the panel to her right and sees the remaining TIE fighter in hot pursuit.

“Guns are stuck in forward position!” Finn yells upward, “I can’t move ‘em!”

Rey distantly remembers a large gaping hull not that far off from where they are now, and forms a quick plan.

“Stay sharp!” she replies, “I’ll turn the ship upside down, and when I do, be ready to fire!”

Another blast rocks their craft, and Rey accelerates the ship in response. Another burst from the TIE fighter would overwhelm their shields. Pulling on the controls, she drives the ship upward through the gaping breach that was the center of the ship and back out into the bright sunlight of the desert. She spirals up, quickly, and she cuts power and rolls the ship upside down, giving Finn the perfect opportunity to fire. Finn had to rely on her skills, and now she had to rely on his.

He reacts just in time, firing at the TIE fighter and sending it bursting into flames and crashing towards the surface. She turns the ship hard away and accelerates into the clouds. Together, they escape into the vastness of space.

* * *

The external observation portal on the Finalizer boasted an uninterrupted view of the vastness of space that was unparalleled anywhere else on the ship. Stars, nebulae, galaxies, all laid out before the viewer. It had been constructed to awe and inspire, to be the perfect place for a conqueror to survey one’s domain.

Everything of significance, after all, is the result of conquest.

Kylo Ren observed the view in silence. Snoke, and later the great Darth Sidious himself, had trained him in contemplation and deliberation. He could recite every Sith meditation ever written, despite not having been brought into the order. Yet.

But he was losing his patience. His wife continued to evade him, despite having sent the best trackers among his knights to follow her trail. They had found his ship, the one that she had stolen to make her escape. She had sold it for _parts_. But they hadn’t found her. And now he was being evaded by a kriffing droid and the might of the First Order was seemingly not enough to capture a glorified _ball_.

He senses someone approaching, and their anxiety and fear is heady in the air like a thick cologne. He can almost taste the sweat running from the base of their neck to beneath the collar of their uniform.

“Something to report, Lieutenant? Or have you come, like myself, to marvel at the view?”

“Sir?” Lieutenant Mitaka asks.

His gloved hand rises to gesture at the sweep of light and energy before them. Thousands of stars are visible, likely hundreds of systems full of sentient life. Barely a fraction of the galaxy he intends to rule. “Look at it, Lieutenant. So much beauty among so much turmoil. And we are tasked with bringing stability to it all, a stability that existed under the Empire and was reduced to anarchy by the Rebellion.”

Lieutenant Mitaka doesn’t comment, instead clearing his throat and presenting his brief report. He wants to do this quickly, wants to be out of Kylo’s presence as soon as possible. A smart choice.

“Sir. Despite our best efforts, we were unable to acquire the Beebee-Ate droid on Jakku.”

He turns to the Lieutenant, who he knows would have preferred it the other way. He knows Mitaka, like most of the First Order, finds it unsettling to have to gaze at the metal mask.

“Do not tell me, Lieutenant, that the droid was destroyed.” His voice is calm, but he can feel the storm brewing beneath it, the rising potential for chaos.

Mitaka swallows hard. “No sir. At least, not so far as we are able to determine. Reports from our troopers on the ground indicate that the droid escaped capture by taking flight aboard a stolen Corellian fighter, a YT model.”

A touch of uncertainty colors Kylo’s response. He cannot rid himself of the almost comical image he's picturing. “The droid stole a freighter?”

“Not exactly, sir. According to these preliminary reports, it had help. Brief glimpses by our troopers correlated with the location of an earlier crash site lead us to believe that trooper FN-2187 may have—”

Mitaka breaks off as Kylo reaches for the lightsaber at his belt and erupts, taking long strides towards the nearest console, a far more satisfying target. He slashes at the console, the walls, the deck, rending and ripping, slashing long lines of bleeding metal. He tears at the very fabric of his ship, unleashing his rage until it simmers instead of boils.

For his part, Mitaka strives to remain perfectly still, to become as invisible as possible. It saves his life.

Kylo breathes hard and shuts off the lightsaber. When he speaks again, his voice is calm. It's as if his destructive rampage had never happened at all. “Is there anything else?”

Mitaka doesn’t relax, tenses up even further. The worst of the report is yet to come. He swallows stiffly and tries to summon any remaining vestiges of courage. “The two were accompanied and likely abetted in their flight by a third party. The footage isn’t clear, so we were unable to make a clear identification, but initial analysis suggests the third party was your wife—”

 _Rey_. Kylo reaches out, and the Force delivers the Lieutenant to him effortlessly. He holds Mitaka by the neck, dangles him a foot above the ground.

His voice takes on a lower timbre, more menacing than the Lieutenant had ever heard.

“ _Where is she now?”_

* * *

Toxic vapor is filling the ship with surprising speed, and Rey frantically dives into the toolbox as she looks for a Harris wrench. The ship’s state had begun declining rapidly once they had fled the surface of Jakku, and if they didn’t fix it, and fast, they’d run the risk of either dying from the vapors or being stuck adrift. Or worse: forced to flee in an escape pod where they’d run an even higher risk of being intercepted by the First Order.

She’s sent Finn down to the gunner’s seat, to try and un-jam it from forward position so if they were attacked again they’d at least have a fighting chance. BB-8 had followed him, determined to lend a hand where it could considering that all this trouble had been for him.

She’s just found the Harris wrench when the noises of the ship fall away and she hears the distinctive hum of the Force bond. All the movement and the growing toxic cloud around her seem to slow, to almost tilt slightly as the Force bends the fabric of space to bring them together. She wishes the Force would take a hint and just leave her alone, but she doesn’t expect it to listen to her.

Kylo stands behind her, incredibly imposing in the small space of the ship’s underbelly. “You were on Jakku,” his modulated voice says flatly.

“You’re a bit late to the party. We’re at lightspeed now, half a dozen systems away and counting,” she lies, hoping, _praying_ it sounds believable and he won’t go scanning for vessels just beyond orbit of the planet. She’s still turned around, still messing with the innards of the ship when he replies.

“You won’t be able to run from me forever, Rey. I’ll catch up to you soon enough.” He’s close, speaking right beside her ear, and she spins around in surprise. He’s right there, tangible and real and she has to remind herself that he isn’t _actually_ on the ship with her. He’s on some First Order vessel somewhere, hopefully far, far away.

“After all,” he croons, still so close, “we have a destiny to fulfill together.”

Her face hardens at the mention of destiny, she hates the idea that her fate has already been decided, that she is only following along a predetermined path, that none of her choices actually _matter_. She escaped Exegol to leave destiny behind.

Rey scoffs, taking several steps back until there’s some space between them. “I don’t believe in destiny.”

Kylo sneers, quickly closing the distance she’s just put between them. “I don’t believe that, Rey. I think you’re just afraid of it. Afraid of _us_.”

She says nothing, stares at the metal grooves in his helmet and stays silent. Then, footsteps. She whips her head hard in their direction, and sees Finn approaching with a big grin on his face. She shuts the bond between her and Kylo fast, and hauls herself out of the innards of the ship while plastering a smile on her face.

“Rey! Gunner’s position is fixed! We should be good to go now if we run into any trouble. How’re things on your end?”

“Good!” Rey says, and turns to hop back into the ship’s messy insides to work on the motivator.“I stopped the toxic vapor but I think there might be another problem with the motivator. Once I fix it, BB-8, we’ll be ready to head off, and I’ll need to know where we’re going.” She levels the droid with a pointed look before ducking down to work on the motivator.

BB-8 lets out a series of distinctive beeps she’s come to know well. _Classified_. _Location on a need-to-know basis._

“Look,” Rey looks up at him, her voice exasperated and her hands gesturing wildly with the Harris wrench in one hand. The events of the day are catching up to her, and her patience which is far from endless to begin with, is growing thin.“The First Order is out hunting for us now; we need to get out of this system _now!_ If I’m going to take you to the Resistance base, then I _need to know_!”

“You heard Rey,” she hears Finn say from above, “She thinks she can get us there— _but you have to tell us where it is_.”

The droid emits a flurry of rapid, soft beeps.

“I don’t speak that, but I get the gist. You don’t trust me, I get it. I was trained by the First Order from birth, now I’ve gone rogue and we’re asking you to tell us where the people you care about most in the galaxy are. But in the First Order’s eyes, I’m something worse than a Resistance fighter. I have all their training, know tons of intel, and I’m looking to switch sides because I’m tired of being on the wrong one. That’s why I’ve done the things I’ve done.I want to be better, Beebee-Ate. I want to be on the right side.” Finn heaves in breaths after the long monologue.

A beat passes in silence while the droid considers.

Rey peeks up from below, “Finn, hand me a Pilex driver?”

It takes him a minute to find the right tool but he does, hands it to her, and Rey shifts her attention from the ex-Trooper to the droid. “So, where are we going?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here's the thing y'all: when I said this was gonna be a slow burn I meant s l o w. these two little lovebirds have some shit to work out, you know?
> 
> quick community poll: what are our thoughts on flashbacks to our time on Exegol?


	5. Safeguards

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oop ok very sorry I haven't updated in two weeks. The semester just started so I'll be updating hopefully once a week from now on, with the exception of midterms and finals season. I've got a lot of later chapters already written so hopefully this updating schedule will be manageable? I promise I will not be abandoning this fic.
> 
> Bad news: I wrote this and am updating in such a rush that the bulk of this has not been beta read. Will edit this later on. If you comment and point out errors I'll consider that a favor, so don't be afraid to let me know!

_“I don’t believe that, Rey. I think you’re just afraid of it. Afraid of us.”_ Kylo insists, but Rey says nothing to him in response. She stares at him, angry and shocked, for a long moment before her head turns sharply to one side, presumably the approach of the droid or FN-2187. Then she’s gone, severing the connection between them in the blink of an eye.

He reaches up and unlatches his helmet with a deep sigh, tossing it onto the bed and moving over to the living area. He approaches his desk and activates the large holoscreen set into the wall directly above it.

The translucent blue screen activates and displays the last thing he was working on— a long timeline made up of surveillance photos, reported sightings, and First Order ground intelligence with the mention of over a dozen civilized worlds. With a flick of his wrist, the timeline expands past the limits of the holoscreen to fill the length of the room. He takes several steps back to look at it all in full view.

The timeline begins on Exegol. He has a wealth of information on Rey’s escape, he had seen to the internal investigations personally. He had interrogated countless Stormtroopers, staff, servants and slaves. It was his ship she had stolen, after all. It was his foolishness that gave her sufficient opportunity to escape.

It had all started after the ceremony. They had exchanged Sith marriage vows before the Emperor and all the aristocracy of the First and Final Order. The Emperor himself had bridged their minds, but the initial creation of the bond would have been only the beginning.

The Sith marriage ceremony is an ancient and uncommon ritual, and not a road to be taken lightly. Sith culture revolves so heavily around betrayal and chaos that true commitment and partnership necessitates certain _safeguards_. Certain absolute guarantees of loyalty. It begins with a more universally known marriage ceremony, but a month of smaller rituals followed after. Before the month would have been out, their energies would have been so intertwined that neither would be to able cause injury to the other without feeling it in turn, and no lie between them could go unnoticed. Over time, the bond between them could have strengthened to such an extent that it could be used to find one another.

He understands why Rey planned her escape for when she did. Had she waited much longer, it’d have been all the more difficult for her to hide from him. The bond fed on proximity, on interaction, on… affection. Getting as far away from him as she could, as early as she could, was the only viable strategy available to her for stunting the bond’s growth.

After their vows had been exchanged and Sith Eternal Cultists had carried his wife off to complete preparations for their wedding night, Rey had escaped. Disguising herself in the servant’s clothes, his wife managed to navigate through the most secure fortress ever built, crawling with military and Sith, unnoticed.

Foolishly, Kylo had docked his personal TIE fighter on the surface instead of in the fortress’s own bay. He had also left it completely unsecured, thinking no one would dare take it. He had been an honored guest of the Emperor himself, to cross Kylo would be to cross the _Emperor_ , a crime which would be met with the punishment of an exceedingly slow, painful death.

Married life, as Kylo has quickly discovered, is full of surprises.

It had taken his forces over a week to recover the bits of his ship that had been scattered all across the deserts of Jedha as a result of her crash landing. The most valuable and irreplaceable pieces she had sold, _of course_ , for passage off of the moon. The trail picked up next on Faos station, then Kril’Dor, Ord Mantell, and half a dozen other planets and moons with no clear connection linking any of them. Eventually, he had decided that she was just picking where to go next entirely at random, perhaps deciding based upon who offered cheapest passage or was willing to let her work her way as payment.

This, of course, made anticipating her movements almost impossible. The trail had gone cold, the bond between them stilted in infancy. Until Jakku. Now the Force was bringing them together constantly, teasing him with glimpses of her or visions of what could be.

He’ll find her and turn her to the dark, by any means necessary. Now that he's seen what a life spent with her is like, there is no acceptable alternative.

* * *

“The weapon,” Hux says, with all the barely-checked fervor of a child looking to use a new toy. Were it not for the Supreme Leader’s presence, the man would be foaming at the mouth. For men such as Hux, killing is a sport, a skill to be cultivated in its own right. His bloodthirstiness perturbes even experienced killers such as Kylo Ren. There is no greater disrespect than to take a life without cause, without meaning.

“It is ready,” Hux continues. “I believe the time has come to use it. We shall destroy the government that supports the Resistance. And in the chaos that will follow, the Resistance will have no choice but to investigate. They will throw all of their resources into trying to discover its source, and in so doing…”

“Reveal themselves.” Snoke finishes, clearly pleased.

“And if they don’t… we’ve destroyed their strongest ally.”

“Yes,” Snoke says in satisfaction. “Extreme. Audacious. It is time the galaxy is made painfully aware of our presence. Go. Oversee preparations.”

Hux puffs out at this, proud. There is a sharp, ruthless kind of smile on his face. “At once, Supreme Leader.”

Kylo does not turn to watch Hux leave. He hears the doors swish open and closed, but keeps his eyes trained on Snoke out of a healthy dose of both fear and respect. One should never take their eyes off of the most dangerous being in the room. The twenty-five-foot tall alien slowly sits on the holographic throne behind him, simultaneously embodying fragility and power. It is a show of weakness, something Snoke would never do in front of an opportunistic dog like Hux. The air between them has changed now, shifted to something more secretive.

“There has been an awakening,” Snoke says, “have you felt it?”

He has. There is no doubt who the Supreme Leader refers to, only one true option on the board: Rey. Unbidden, his thoughts drift to her, of his fiery wife who stalked up to him with hellfire in her eyes, bared her teeth like a wild lothcat and snarled at him. There was such ferocity within her, so many layers of anger and hatred and passion. Her upbringing on Exegol hadn’t been a pleasant one, that much he knew, and it had cultivated such resentment within her, such bitterness.

And the power growing within her? She took his breath away.

Once turned to the dark, Rey Palpatine would be _devastating_. And she was his _wife_.

_You could turn her wholly to the dark side_ , a voice inside him whispered. _You could offer to be her teacher, to show her the ways of the Force._ _She could be yours in every way._

“Yes.” Kylo says at last, his attention divided between his master and the thought of Rey at his side. But he has waited too long now, and can feel the tendrils of Snoke reaching into his mind, casually flipping through his thoughts to find what has him so distracted. It is useless to present any form of resistance to the sudden intrusion, and Kylo merely bites down and accepts the pain, determined not to show any shred of weakness. He had always been taught that pain, when properly utilized, can serve as a path to more power.

“Ah,” Snoke leers,thin lips parting to show a glimpse of jagged teeth, pleased at having found what he was looking for. “Your fugitive wife. Yes, you are correct that she would appear to have more potential than previously thought. If captured and turned to the dark, our victory is assured. If she finds Skywalker and turns to the light, all will be lost.”

“She _will_ turn,” Kylo insists. “She is so full of fury she is halfway there already.”

“That bond is not one-sided. See to it that your feelings do not cause you to be—” Snoke spits out the next word with great disdain, “ _infected_ by her light.” He pauses, reminiscing.

“Kylo Ren, I watched the Galactic Empire rise, fall, and now rise again. The gullible prattle on about the triumph of truth and justice, of democracy and free will. As if such things were solid and real instead of subjective judgments, or worse, fantasies. The historians have it all wrong. It was neither poor strategy nor arrogance that brought down the Empire. You know all too well what it was.”

Kylo nods once. He knows how Darth Vader had fallen. “Sentiment.”

“Yes,” Snoke hisses long and slow, as if it causes him pain to hear the word said aloud. “Such a simple thing. Such a foolish error of judgment. A momentary lapse in an otherwise exemplary life. Had Lord Vader not succumbed to emotion at precisely the worst moment— had the father killed the son— the Empire would have prevailed. We would not be where we are today, having to rebuild what was so carelessly discarded.”

“I am immune to the light,” Kylo assures him confidently. “By the grade of your training, I will not be seduced.”

“Your self-belief is commendable, Kylo Ren. It is true that I have never had a student with such promise before you, but do not let this blind you. No one knows the limits of their own power until it has been tested to the utmost, as yours has not been. It has come to our notice that the droid we seek is aboard the _Millennium Falcon_ , once again in the hands of your father, Han Solo. Even you, Master of the Knights of Ren, have never faced such a test.”

Kylo considers his reply carefully. He pays no attention to the cries of the man he had been before, buried deep under years of pain and training. Drawing a deep breath he flatly says, “It does not matter. He means nothing to me. My allegiance is with you, with the Emperor. No one will stand in our way.”

Snoke’s eyes squint until they are only slits, and his Master peers at him with a shrewd stare. A long moment passes as Snoke stares at him, perhaps seeing into Kylo’s future or looking for some unseen weakness.

“We shall see,” Snoke says at last, giving a satisfied nod. “We shall see.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I'm immune to the light" lol yeah ok


	6. Rathtars

Misdirected blasts smash into the crawl space around them, tearing streaks into the metal and rapidly heating the floor beneath them. Finn and Rey crawl for their lives, desperately trying to escape the battle between the two rival gangs and the owners of the freighter; Han and Chewie.

“That was a mistake!” Finn howls, hissing from the way the overheating metal floor burns his hands and knees.

“ _Huge!_ ” Rey agrees, and they race towards the small hatch, a few dozen paces away, hissing at their burning skin all the while.

When they get there, Finn flips open the hatch tentatively, checking either side of the brightly lit corridor. Seeing neither evilly chattering Kanjiklub members nor heavily armed Guavians, and most important, no multi-limbed rathtars, he quickly climbs out. Once he’s out, he pulls Rey up too, and points to the right.

“ _Falcon’s_ this way!”

Rey hesitates, knowing their rapid dashing around the freighter had her completely turned around. “You sure?”

“No,” Finn admits, “But we can’t stay here and wait to be found. We’ve got to try _something_.”

Rey shrugs in agreement and as they race for a far corner, she notes with appreciation how easily the former Stormtrooper keeps up with her. Having run across sand for months, Rey is much faster on solid ground. It’s almost odd to not sink a bit with every step.

“These rathtars,” she asks him breathlessly, “what do they look like?”

But as soon as they round the corner she gets her answer, the two of them brought up short by the sight of the surviving gang members doing battle with the subject of her query. It is _enormous_. Its body is almost as wide and as tall as the corridor. The bulk of it is composed of one red, bulbous body whose primary feature is a gaping maw with rows and rows and _rows_ of teeth. Extending beyond that are a dozen tentacles, longer than Rey is tall.

Rey raises a hand to her mouth, simultaneously mesmerized and horrified.

“They look like that.” Finn reaches over and takes her arm, pulling her away from the scene and back the way they came, around a different corner, but they didn’t turn fast enough.

One tentacle whips around Finn’s waist, and moving with incredible speed for something so massive, it rushes off with the screaming trooper in its grasp.

“ _FINN!_ ”

Though it is too big and too fast for her, she gives chase anyway. It takes only seconds for her to lose sight of him, and only another handful of moments before she’s no longer able to hear Finn’s cries for help. Even if she does manage to catch up, Rey knows the rathtar has more than enough appendages to beat her without having to let go of her friend.

Still, she runs after them.

Soon enough she caught site of a door labeled “Subsidiary Bay Control Room” and nearly ran past it before the full meaning of the words struck home. Desperate, she slams her palm over the access panel and the door slides aside, admitting her.

Rey completely ignores the large banks of instrumentation and heads straight towards the set of monitors. There, she sees clear views of motionless cargo, empty storage rooms, the Millennium Falcon, and…

Finn! She spots Finn, being dragged down a main corridor by the rathtar. They’re heading directly towards an empty intersection.

Rey scans her eyes over the controls, looking for just the right switch and hovers her hand over it. She watches with determination, waiting, knowing this is likely her only chance to rescue Finn in one piece. As the rathtar edges forward, it checks both cross corridors before starting forward again.

She flips the switch. An indicator flips from green to red. In a thunderous smash, a blast door descends with gratifying speed, and one of the rathtar’s tentacles is severed by the emergency door. Finn and the carnivorous cephalopod are now separated by the thick durasteel blast door.

Rey dashes out of the control room, panting from exertion but grinning when she finds Finn dazedly struggling to his feet and trying to extricate himself from the still-clinging tentacle.

“It had me!” He says, and turns around, “but the blast door— it came down at just the right moment…”

“That was me.” She tells him, too out of breath and in too much of a hurry to explain in any more detail. “Which way did you say the _Falcon_ was?”

He eyed her quizzically before pointing. “That way— I hope.”

In the cockpit, Han is hitting one control after another, a little more relief filling him with each green indicator light. He’s visibly startled when Rey arrives, and she heads straight to the copilot’s seat.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Han asks, gruff and annoyed, he gestures back in the direction of the lounge. “Passengers go back there.”

Rey slides her fingers over the console controls, going through a typical pre-launch sequence, and glances over her shoulder for barely a moment when she replies. “Unkar, the last guy who had your ship, installed a fuel pump. If we don’t prime it, we’re not going anywhere.”

“I hate that guy,” Han mutters from behind her. “I don’t even know him and I hate him.”

The corners of her mouth lift as she continues to bring the instrumentation on her side of the cockpit to life. “You and me both. Meanwhile, though, you could use a copilot.”

Han frowns at her, the wrinkles on his face make the expression more pronounced. “I’ve got one. He’s back there.” Raising his voice, he yells towards the lounge, “ _Right? I’ve still got a copilot_?”

A bellow of pain and a litany of curses in Shyriiwook follow.

“ _C’mon Chewie: It’s only a flesh wound!_ ” She hears Finn say. His observation prompts another tirade of curses and a new round of bellowing, considerably more stressed.

“ _Fine!_ ” Han shouts back. “ _Be that way! But don’t you dare think about dying without me!_ ” His hands fly over the controls and he addresses Rey while still flipping switches and toggling dials. “Fuel pump’s primed. Watch thrust from your end: We’re gonna jump to lightspeed.”

It had not escaped Rey that they were still inside the freighter. She had read a lot about ships, all kinds of ships, (it wasn’t like there was anything better to do on Exegol) and never had she heard of the maneuver he was proposing.“From _inside_ the hangar? Is that even possible?”

Han shrugs and speaks with the ease of a man who does the impossible half a dozen times before breakfast. “I never answer that question,” he says, “until after I’ve done it.”

Her further protests are interrupted by a ravenous rathtar landing on top of the ship, its massive radial mouth covering the entire forward port. It was chewing at the transparisteel, seemingly determined to get at the living non-rathtars it perceived inside of the craft. Designed to protect against high-velocity meteoric impacts, the port suffered no immediate damage, but its ability to protect against the sharp teeth of a rathtar over the long-term was not a thing Rey was particularly eager to test.

“This is _really_ not how I thought this day would go,” Han mutters, and turns to Rey. “Get the shields up, and angle ‘em.”

Rey swiftly works a few more controls, recalls the way the ship had withstood First Order fire back on Jakku, and glances over at the older man. “Pretty muscular shields for a Corellian freighter.”

“You may not believe it, but there are some people out there who don’t like me.” He says smirking slightly, not directly responding to her insinuation.

Rey peers down to the quartet of gang members who are emerging from cover to fire at the ship. Their shots are handled by the _Falcon’s_ shields, but the detonations could still be heard from inside the ship. “I can't imagine,” she murmurs wryly.

Han turns to yell in the direction of the lounge, “Hang on back there! We’re leaving, and in a hurry!” He then turns back to the controls, and finishes the pre-flight sequence. “Come on, baby,” Han whispers lovingly to the console, “don’t let me down,”

He pulls on the main hyperdrive control.

Nothing.

_“What?”_

Rey glances down, and reaches across to his side of the console, calmly activating a control he hadn’t touched. “Compressor,” she says matter-of-factly.

He shoots her a dark look, but there’s no real malice behind it. As he slowly pulls back on the drive control for a second time, he even shoots her a half-smile. And as an enormous, overpowering thunder fills the cargo hangar as the Falcon’s engines come to life, his eyes are alight with glee.

* * *

Despite their escape, the Millennium Falcon barely hangs on by a thread. Unkar Plutt had only paid for the bare minimum maintenance on the craft, and as such the ship is far more suited to sitting idle on a desert than navigating the unforgiving vastness of space. Components that had worked during their time on Jakku are either malfunctioning or failing completely now.

The alarms, unlike the rest of the ship, seem to be in perfect working order.

Rey and Han do their best to ignore them as they work in the cockpit, but as soon as they fix one problem it seems like two more materialize to take its place. Their main issue is a matter of degrees. If they don’t fix the ship, they’ll all die, and there will be nothing but debris and bits of her flesh for Kylo Ren to haul back to Exegol, which Rey supposes is likely the only benefit of dying via explosion.

She indicates a readout whose numbers are already in the red and on the rise. “The drive containment torus is overheating.”

“Yeah,” Han grunted, busy trying to prevent them from blowing up on his own side of the cockpit. “You know why?”

A second glance at the copilot’s console gives her the answer. “Field instability. We need to recalculate and readjust the relevant parameters.”

“Recalculate?” Han eyes the instrumentation on his side of the cockpit critically. He purses his lips and toggles a few controls. “Yeah, hold on. Readjusting…” A number of indicator lights turn red, all at once. “ _Kriff_. Power overload!”

Rey lets out a string of particularly vile curses in a number of languages at her console, and Han shoots her an almost affronted look. “I can fix that! Maybe there’s—”

“Field instability is approaching critical! If it gets much higher, we won’t be able to stabilize it—”

“Maybe there’s an auto-flux modulation system? That hasn’t been activated yet? We can try transferring auxiliary power to it!”

“I’m on it!” Han says, but a moment later a deafening roar comes from the lounge.

_“Chewie, you’ve got to let go of me, understand? I can’t secure this bandaging properly if I can’t see what I’m doing. Or move. Or breathe.”_

Grim-faced, Han rises from the pilot’s seat and starts to head in its direction. “Be right back. You’ve got the con.” He growled, and Rey nods absentmindedly, completely focused on the controls and utterly unaware of the tremendous compliment she’s just been given.

She launches into work, possible courses of action flying through her mind. Whatever problem the ship was having, automatic calibration was definitely a contributing factor. Maybe she could…?

Rey smiles to herself, thrilled at having found the answer. She dives back into work, knowing exactly what she has to do.

When all the alarms stop rather abruptly, Han rushes back into the cockpit, knowing from experience that something has either gone terribly wrong or terribly right. He gives Rey a curious look when he finds her sitting back in her copilot’s seat, a satisfied grin on her face.

“What’d you do?” He asks, confused and too pessimistic to not be suspicious.

“Bypassed the auto-flux and recalibrated manually,” She says, nodding towards the console. “Field has stabilized. Toroidal containment temperature is dropping toward normal.” She lets out a long breath, exhausted but overflowing with pride at achieving the almost impossible. “Anything else?”

He lets out a short, appreciative laugh and she gets a glimpse of the carefree man Han perhaps used to be.

* * *

“So. Fugitives, huh?”

A couple of hours have passed now and the ship is in pretty good shape given the circumstances. Rey managed to stabilize the ship’s systems and put everything on autopilot, and now they were hurtling through hyperspace, their destination some planet named Takodana. Rey’s never even _heard_ of the planet before. Rey and Finn are both sitting on the lounge couch, while Chewie lays inside the bed alcove. Han looms above the both of them, one hand on the wall of the ship as he looks down at them expectantly, waiting to hear their explanation. He radiates all the energy of an experienced father, like he’s loomed above a son or a daughter before and demanded answers.

Finn nods at Han and indicates towards BB-8. “It’s the map he’s storing. The First Order wants it and they’ll kill anyone who tries to keep it from them.”

“They’re with the Resistance," Rey says. "I helped them escape Jakku, so in the mind of the First Order, I’m an accomplice.”

Han eyes Finn with new respect upon hearing Rey’s small lie (which wasn’t _really_ a lie, was it? Finn _intended_ to join the Resistance, he hadn’t _officially_ done so, but had probably contributed just as much to their cause as any other member, right?) and raised an eyebrow. He appraised the former stormtrooper with a critical eye before pursing his lips, perhaps willing to let the matter lie for now.

Rey, of course, leaves out the fact that she is much more than an accomplice in the eyes of the First Order.

After a moment, Han looks to BB-8. “Let’s see whatcha got.”

Eagerly, the droid rolls into the middle of the room. A lens brightens, and Han shuts the overhead lights off so the lounge is filled with the blue light of an enormously detailed and complex star map hologram. Nebulae, solo stars, and entire systems are displayed before them. Rey is in awe, who even in her time on the run had never seen such a map— but looks over to see Han frowning.

He steps forward into the three-dimensional representation, using his finger to trace system positions and locator stars like one would the skin of a lover. She realizes, then, that Han Solo has likely spent large swaths of his life in space, that he likely knows the galaxy better than the back of his own hand.

“This is accurate,” he says finally, “but not complete. It’s just a piece. I can tell from the location of the breaks and from what’s only partially shown. We’ll need the rest of the map if we’re ever going to find Luke. It won’t be easy, people have searched for him ever since he disappeared.”

 _Disappeared_. The word sticks with her. Rey knows from experience that no one just _disappears_. This legend, this famed Luke Skwalker, if he was important, if he had people who cared about him, he wouldn’t exile himself on some forgotten planet unless he was running from something. “Why’d he leave, anyway?”

Han purses his lipsand grits his teeth as a shadow of pain crosses his face. He stares long and hard into the star map, in the direction of the unknown regions, before speaking again. “He was training a new generation of Jedi. There was no one else left to do it, so he took the burden on himself. Everything was fine, until one boy, an apprentice…” That shadow of pain reappears, and Rey recognizes it immediately this time: grief. After a pause and a weary sigh, Han continues, “The boy turned against him, and everything Luke had worked towards was destroyed. Luke felt responsible, and he walked away from everything and went on a personal quest— a search for the first Jedi temple.”

 _The Jedi._ Bogeymen of every Sith child’s nightmares, depicted as uncaring lightsiders who rejected what makes a being whole: passion, _love_. Later in life, her teachers had gone to great pains to impress upon her how foolish and shortsighted they were to rule out use of the Force for personal gain, how rejecting Sith magics and the power of the dark side made even the great Jedi masters weaker than any competent Sith.

Rey had once believed it all, how could she not? On Exegol, the power of the Sith was unstoppable. Insurmountable. And yet, the First Order chased her and the map with such vigor that this Luke Skywalker must be a Force user of enormous power to inspire such a response. The First Order wouldn’t be chasing the map unless they thought Skywalker posed a threat.

Rey is drawn away from her thoughts by the sound of Han speaking again as he turns within the projection of the star map. He sounds wistful, almost nostalgic. “I used to think the Force was a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, some magical power holding together good and evil, light and dark…”

He pauses, his voice fading and the look in his eyes tells her his thoughts are in a far away place. “The crazy thing is, it’s all real. The Jedi, the Force— it’s true. All true.” With a shake of his head, Han brings himself back to reality. His expression hardens into one of grim determination.

“Just as it’s true what Finn said earlier: the First Order will kill all of us for that map.”

An alarm sounds, sudden and high-pitched and startles everyone but Han. Chewbacca starts to rise, to see what component has failed this time, but Han puts out a conciliatory hand to prevent him. “No. You relax.” He glances at Finn and shoots him a brief grateful smile, “Don’t risk the good work of our friend here by ruining what he’s done.”

Han stands up at motions for Rey to follow him as he heads towards the cockpit. “This is our stop.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takodana is next! Y'all know what that means... ;)
> 
> Thanks always to Riverrah for being an excellent beta!


	7. Takodana

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Massive update today! We've finally bridged the gap between the earlier scenes I've written and the almost 12,000 words of content that's a bit later. Watch me almost double our posted word count in one fell swoop. 
> 
> Enjoy!

Takodana is _perfect_. If there is a more beautiful world in the galaxy than Takodana, it is unknown to Rey, who can’t take her eyes off of the verdant forests and the unbelievably brilliant blue seas and lakes that shine brilliantly in the sunlight. The otherwise clear sky is flecked with the occasional fluffy white cloud, and the _Millennium Falcon_ glides through them as Han slows the ship to a suborbital velocity and into a shallow dive, skimming the ship just over the water.

Rey catches the glimpse of coral and brilliantly colored fish just beneath the water’s surface. She’s captivated by an entire world under the water, so different from her home world. Is there no aspect of this planet that isn’t beautiful?

Rey had travelled to over a dozen worlds over the course of the first few months following her escape, determined to shake off her pursuers, but trading work for passage had landed her on desert worlds or industrial planets, even a space port, never a world like _this_. Never with this much green.

And oh, there are so many variations of green, from the deep evergreen hue of the tall whisperpine trees on the mountains to the lush bright green of the grass. Each new species of flora adds another shade of green to her rapidly expanding understanding of color. To think she had lived almost her whole life until now with such a dull understanding of the possibilities the galaxy had to offer.

“Hey— y’okay?” Han asks quietly, and for the first time Rey notices she’s on the verge of tears.

“I—I didn’t know there was this much green in the whole galaxy,” she says in awe, staring at the endless evergreen forest and the rolling hills and the water that glistens like liquid silver.

A towering castle comes into view as they prepare for touch-down, an impossibly large an ancient-looking structure, hewn from large blocks of weather-worn dark stone. The bulk of the castle juts out into a long freshwater lake like a peninsula, and the tallest tower of the structure forms the point of the peninsula, no doubt granting the owner a perfect view of the landscape all the way to the horizon. The other side of the castle features a main landing area crowded with vessels, with a handful of smaller clusters of ships parked a short hike’s worth up the mountainous terrain to the east. Like the _Falcon_ , the vast majority of the docked vessels were worn but well maintained.

After landing the ship, they take the rest of the day to attend to a few other repairs and to take a long rest. Rey and Finn hadn’t slept since Jakku, and Chewie and Han seemed to be on their last legs as well. The next day, they’re fresh with energy and once they’ve disembarked, Rey and BB-8 marvel at the beautiful views. The blackneedle, coilwood and whisperpine trees soar above them and fill the air with a sharp freshness that fills her lungs, and the sweet smell of plom blooms, purple passions and blueblossoms float towards her on a breeze. A fresh burst of energy fills her from the handful of hours of sleep she was able to manage on the ship, and everything is far more beautiful in the early light of the next morning. Existing among nature like this, filled with foliage and flowers and life is _rejuvenating_. The forest parts into a small clearing filled with wildflowers and butterflies just beyond them, and Rey’s entire being itches with the urge to go and smell them all, maybe pick a few and weave them into her three distinctive buns.

She could spend the rest of her life on Takodana, Rey thinks with no small degree of longing. She could build herself a small cottage, start a garden and spend the rest of her days living off of the land, creating a life infinitely better than any she’s ever known. The imaginary cabin and all of its little details are created in her mind too fast for her to stop, and she suddenly finds herself imagining just what she’d like her windows to look like, how perhaps she could build a small room and take up pottery, or painting. She imagines how she could dry herbs on the walls and grow great big vines along the rafters and it could be a beautiful simple life. Her heart _aches_ for it.

Perhaps, even, have a bed big enough for two? She could find someone, someone _good_ , to spend her life with. Unbidden, the silhouette of a tall and broad-shouldered man comes to mind, and she casts it aside without any introspection into how it looks remarkably like her husband.

She wants it more than anything, but if she put down roots in such a pretty place as this she’d feel terrible when Kylo Ren or one of his knights inevitably found her and burnt it all to the ground.She’d never be able to forgive herself.

“Admiring the view?” Han asks gruffly, stepping up from behind to take in the landscape alongside her.

“It doesn’t even smell real,” Rey says, breathless and in awe and a bit heartbroken at the sudden loss of the life she’s just imagined.

Han nods understandingly, and gestures at the surrounding forest, “You’ve got all this greenery pumping out oxygen. Makes a big difference when all you’ve been sucking is recycled ship atmosphere.” He takes a blaster from his belt and offers it to her, a sleek chrome thing that would be quite the contrast to her dirty robes and well-worn wooden staff. “Here,” he says. “You might need this.”

Rey looks down at the weapon, then back at him, gesturing to her staff strapped to her back. “I’ve been in tough situations once or twice, I can handle myself.”

“I know you can,” Han assures her, still holding out the shiny blaster. “That’s why I’m giving it to you. Take it.”

She gnaws at her lower lip before gingerly taking the blaster out of his hands. It’s weight surprises her, it’s heavier than it looks.

He sees her surprise at the weight and arches a brow. “You do know how to fire that?”

“Aim it and pull the trigger,” She shoots back.

“A bit more to this model than that,” Han says, clearly amused. “Put a little more effort in, get a little more result out. This model in particular is more precise and packs a bigger punch than your typical blaster. You’ve got a lot to learn, Rey.”

She hums, raising the weapon and pointing it at an imaginary target, careful to keep the muzzle pointed well away from Han or anyone else.

“Rey,” he repeats purposefully, intending his words to have meaning. “Rey, I’ve been thinking about taking on some crew.”

She smiles at him, a lopsided and wry look. “You must not like me at all then. According to what you told us earlier, joining your crew means my life expectancy takes a nosedive.”

He brushes it off with a shrug. “We wouldn’t be hunting rathtars, if that’s what you mean. Besides, you’re better than the all the crew members Chewie and I took on put together. We needed a bigger crew for a bigger job with a bigger ship, but the Falcon’s our home. Doesn’t need a big crew. We’d only need a second mate, someone to help out. Someone who can keep up with Chewie and me and who’s smart. Someone who appreciates the _Falcon_ and her hidden qualities.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “You’re offering me a job?”

He meets her stare without blinking. “It doesn’t pay right away and I’m not going to be nice to you and—”

Taken aback, she interrupts him. “You’re offering me a _job_.”

“I’m thinking about it,” Han corrects her quickly. “That’s all.”

“Well… if you did, I’d be flattered,” Rey pauses, stops herself from imagining another life for herself, something else she knows she can’t have. “But I’m running from something and it’s not fair to get you mixed up in it.”

“Well sithspit, kid. Getting mixed up in other people’s business has been my life’s work. If you need some help…”

She stops for a moment, even thinks about considering his offer, before shaking her head. “Thank you, but… I think I need to do this on my own.”

Han claps a hand on her shoulder, an almost fatherly gesture. “Let me know if you change your mind, kid.”

Rey nods, sincere. “I will.”

* * *

“Why are we here again?” Finn asks, staring up at a wide, curving stone staircase as they approach the impressive structure. Now that she’s closer, Rey admires the odd, trapezoidal stonework of the ancient castle.

“To get your droid on a clean ship,” Han responds. “Do you think it was luck that Chewie and I found the Falcon? If we can find it on our scanners, the First Order’s not far behind.” He indicates the soaring walls now rising before them, and the hundreds of flags from governments, cultures, factions and tribes hung from the battlements. “The galaxy’s full of watering holes, but nothing like this place. An old smuggler named Maz Kanata has ran this place for over a thousand years. If we want to get Beebee-Ate to the Resistance, she’s our best bet.”

* * *

Bazine Netal tracks Rey and her companions through the Cantina with the sly grin of a predator just having found the best catch of it’s life. Once they’re out of earshot, she peels herself off of Grummagar, a slovenly dressed piece of Dowutin muscle she’s been using for his connections. She had spent the bulk of her time these past weeks here, in this filthy cantina on this worthless waste of a planet, keeping her ears open to hear something of value.

And now? Oh, now her investment has been returned tenfold. She tracks the woman in the dusty robes with the staff strapped to her back, young and svelte under all those rags. The cut of her jaw, the way she keeps her hair, it has to be her, the woman the First Order has been tracking all these months.

Bazine’s heart skips a beat at the thought of all the credits she’ll receive as a reward.

Slipping away from the crowd, she pulls the communicator out from it’s hidden spot at her belt. It’s a thin, high-tech thing, capable of sending encrypted messages via the central planetary communications booster. With all that power at her disposal, it doesn’t take long to establish a long-range connection.

“This better be good,” Hux replies, exasperated.

“ _I’ve got them_.”


	8. Hosnian Cataclysm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Trigger Warning** 
> 
> This chapter involves use of Force holds and temporary loss of bodily autonomy/control over oneself. Content in question is towards the end of the chapter, beginning with "she tries to run".

Rey can only name a third of the things on her plate. There was more food in a fifteen foot radius than she had seen in months. Dishes of all types from countless worlds and cultures. There was Jogan fruit cake, candied Sihan peaches, Jun-lime fizz water, Exodeenian noodles and Glowblue pasta of a dozen varieties.

Maz Kanata makes it a priority to divert dishes her way. “You’re too thin,” she says, with a scowl on her face. “Have you ever eaten a meal a day in your life?”

Her companions are also eating with gusto. Han has an appetite to rival her own but is far pickier than she, who grabs a sample of everything that comes her way.

“A map leading to the first Jedi temple!” Maz marvels, once Han and Chewie finish explaining why they’ve come to Takodana. “To Skywalker himself! I’ve never given up hope for him, you know.”

“That’s good to hear, because I have a favor to ask,” Han says, taking a sip of a drink that was served to him initially on _fire_.

Maz looks at him knowingly. “Yes, I know. You need a loan. I heard about those rathtars. King Prana’s not happy, you know.” She stops in that abrupt way of hers and turns to Rey. “How’s the food?”

“So delicious,” Rey says enthusiastically between bites.

“So, I need you to get this droid to the Resistance…” Han says, and Maz turns her attention back to him.

“Me?” She says archly. “I’ll help you find passage, avoid the hunter squads and even give you that loan, but this journey to the Resistance is not mine to take, Solo. You know that.”

Han’s expression turns uneasy. “Leia doesn’t want to see me.”

“I don’t blame her!” Maz exclaims. “But the fight against the First Order is about more than you and that excellent woman. Han, go home.”

Rey can’t help but snort. “I think the Resistance’s fight is an admirable one, but the First Order can’t be defeated. Their forces are unst—” She breaks off as Maz adjusts her goggles, making her eyes grow even larger than usual. Then she adjusts them again, her eyes growing impossibly huge. In a fraction of a second she’s climbed up onto the table, and stands directly in front of Rey.

Rey twitches at the sudden attention, rearing back.

“Solo,” Finn says, eyeing Maz wearily. “What’s she doing?”

Han shrugs with the ease of a man that has seen far too much to be afraid of an ancient alien adjusting her goggles. “No idea, but it ain’t good.”

Maz finally speaks. “I’ve lived for over one thousand years, girl. Long enough to see the same eyes in different people.” She adjusts the goggles yet again, and to Rey’s relief they go back to normal. “I’m looking at the eyes of a woman who wants to run,” she says solemnly.

“If you’d seen what I’ve seen,” Rey replies, somber, “You’d want to run too. The First Order will slaughter us.” She remembers the endless ships that lay just beneath the surface of Exegol, the massive forces her grandfather commands, and the ease with which he ripped his enemies apart.

Maz considers her for a long moment, then points back into the main hall area. “Big head, red shirt, shiny gun. Bright red helmet with ear flares. They’re bound for the Outer Rim. Will trade transportation for work. Go.”

Rey had expected the ancient Cantina owner to try to convince her to stay, to join the Resistance. She blinks. Everything had just happened so fast. Awkwardly, she rises from her seat.

Then she turns to Han, offers him the gleaming silver blaster he had given her. “It was good to meet you.”

Han looks at her, gives her a small smile and pats her on the shoulder. Despite the attempt to give her a good farewell, the older man radiates disappointment. “Keep it, kid.”

Rey nods, but her thoughts are swimming as she approaches the table Maz points to. There are no humans in this group, save maybe the red-helmeted being she quickly identifies as the captain, but they eye her without prejudice. The warty, one-legged Gabdorin first mate even waits politely for her to state her business.

Rey centers herself and only barely hesitates as she addresses the captain. “I’m told you’re looking for help. I’m a competent mechanic. I’ll work for a lift to any neutral civilized world on the Outer Rim.”

The first mate replies to her, outlines its terms. The language the Gabdorin speaks is hoarse and rough and Rey just barely understands it.

“It’s a deal.” Rey smiles, then immediately wonders if Gabdorin culture considers the quick show of teeth to be hostile or otherwise offensive.

The Gabdorin first mate moves to speak again but is interrupted by Finn’s sudden arrival, accompanied by an anxious BB-8.

 _“What are you doing?”_ Finn hisses, grabbing her arm and wrenching her around to face him. The look on his face says that he knows exactly what she’s doing.

Rey tears her arm out of Finn’s grip and turns to the leader of the alien crew and gives them her sweetest smile, “One moment, please.”She yanks the ex-Stormtrooper and the droid away from the table and into an empty corner, away from prying eyes and leaving the aliens to mutter amongst themselves.

“You heard what Maz said!” Finn hisses at her. “You’re part of this fight. We all are.” He searches her face. “You’ve gotta feel something…”

“This isn’t about what I _feel_ ,” Rey hisses back. “Look, I did what I said I would. I delivered the two of you to the Resistance. Han Solo’s a general, right? He can take it from here.” She gestures over to the man, deep in conversation with Maz Kanata as he drinks his second Anatakarian Fire Dancer.

Rey sighs, long and deep and pinches the bridge of her nose in frustration. “I’m not who you think I am, Finn. It’s dangerous to be around me, you understand? It’s better for all of us if I get as far away from all of this as I can.”

She thinks of her grandfather, of Kylo Ren, of the knights he’s sent after her. Rey doesn’t believe the Resistance can win this war, but she won’t lend a hand in their destruction by giving Kylo Ren yet another reason to track them down. Better to divide his energy and lead his forces on a wild bantha chase.

She’d be doing them a _favor_ by leaving,

“You can’t just leave, Rey,” Finn insists. “Think about it— your likeness is probably plastered all over this quadrant by now, and if the First Order doesn’t find you, reward-seekers and bounty hunters will be scouring every port in hopes of picking you up! If you stick with us, stick with _me_ , the Resistance can protect you.”

Rey glances over his shoulder to look at Han Solo and Chewie. She could see herself working with them, developing a good relationship with Solo over time, building on the grudging respect he already has for her and becoming fast friends with Chewie. But Han Solo seemed to be a man constantly caught in the middle of conflict, and Rey wants to be as far from the action as she can get. In the next galaxy over, if she can manage it. 

And Finn, ruthlessly loyal to a cause he barely knows because of a life-debt he owes to man he met for only a moment. It’s brave in a way Rey has never seen before. Or naive. She wishes, not for the first time, that she was ignorant of the fleet hidden on Exegol, of Darth Sidious, of her destiny, all of it. She wishes she could join him, wishes she could throw caution to the wind and just believe in something.

“I’m not a hero,” she says, shaking her head resignedly. “I’m not Resistance material. I’m not _special_.” What she doesn’t say is that her likeness has likely been plastered all over the galaxy for _months_. It would be too hard to explain, lead to too many questions Rey doesn’t want to answer.

Finn looks at her like she’s just claimed she has two heads and the sky is purple. Pleading with her, he says, “Rey, what are you talking about? I’ve seen you in action. Rey, _please_ , don’t go. Whatever’s holding you back, whatever you’re running from, we can figure it out.”

“I won’t have you die because of me, Finn. Take care of yourself,” she begs him. “Please.” She takes one last look at him, at BB-8, and gives them both a sad smile before turning back to the group of waiting aliens.

The red-helmeted captain looks up at her, and she nods once, hoping the gesture is as universal as she’s been told. “I’m ready whenever you are.” The first mate replies again in his stumbling language, and she nods again in response. “Now is perfect.”

They rise and make their way to the main doorway. She tries to think of something else to say to the group she’s leaving behind, arguably the only friends she’s ever made. But everything she thinks of sounds so superfluous, so artificial. Better to leave it as it is, she tells herself. And as she leaves Maz Kanata’s cantina, she only looks back once. Her gut curls with regret, and she leaves the castle feeling distinctly like she took the wrong path.

* * *

The hike to reach the alien crew’s ship through the forest is a long one. Rey cherishes every moment she spends in the lush forest, surrounded by blueblossom flowers and the fresh scent of the blackneedle, coilwood and whisperpine trees. The terrain flows from smooth hills and meadows to sharp, steep drops or increases in elevation, and the Gabdorin first mate pants for breath, huffs what Rey assumes to be complaints that they docked the ship so far away. The red-helmeted captain says nothing, which seemed to be their signature.

They’re two thirds of the way there when Rey notices a new star in the sky. A new light has appeared in the northeast, bright enough to be visible in the middle of the day. Has a star gone nova? Supernovas are relatively predictable events, Rey thinks, surely if a star was set to go nova so soon it would be a talked about event? None of the gossip or the talking Rey had overheard in the cantina mentioned anything about an upcoming supernova.

Rey brings this up to her new crew-mates. The captain looks up, turns to his first mate, and then keeps walking. The Gabdorin insists it must be a star going nova, that nothing else in the galaxy could create such a bright light in the sky.

Rey nods, tentatively convinced, but feels a rising tide of dread in the pit of her stomach regardless.

Then she hears the deep thrum of ion engines overhead, and looks up to the sky for a second time. She’s floored by what she sees. Dozens of TIE fighters, four to six personnel transports and heavy bombers are all descending into the atmosphere. And they’re all heading to Maz Kanata’s castle.

The castle— where her friends still are.

The captain and the Gabdorin first mate begin running towards their ship, a distinctive red freighter Rey glimpses just above the hill. They call after her, but she’s already turned to go back the way they’ve just come from.

Panicked, she races through the trees with the wind at her back, running towards the castle with a reckless sort of speed. She hardly looks down at the ground, but her feet manage to navigate over tree roots and rocks with ease despite it.

A thunderous crash rocks the earth, and Rey slows at the top of a slight rise just in time to see the TIE fighters reducing the stone walls to dust. The castle collapses in moments. Waves of stormtroopers are unleashed from personnel transports, intercepting smugglers and traders frantically running for cover or escape.

She turns from the sight and keeps running wildly in the direction of the castle, too far to make a difference, too far to help her friends. The sound of a shuttle breaking through the canopy and beginning to land grows from behind her, and suddenly she’s far too close to the conflict. If she keeps running toward the castle, the forces from the ship behind her will deny her any means of escape, or intercept her before she can even join the fray.

She dashes away from the castle and the transport, running in a third direction. If, by some miracle, they haven’t seen her, she can take the long way around and prevent being intercepted. If they have, she’ll draw the forces away from the conflict and into the middle of the woods, perhaps giving her friends a better chance of escape.

As she heads deeper into the forest, the whisperpines and coilwood trees that only a half hour ago were picturesque seemed to close in around her.

She’s drawn her blaster now. The safety is off and she tries hard to hold off firing defensively in the direction of every wind-rustled branch and falling leaf.

A dark figure steps out from behind a tree. He is a nightmare come to life.

His lightsaber has been activated and it burns red like a barely-controlled flame, spitting sparks onto the forest floor.

Terrified, Rey raises her blaster and fires again and again and _again_. Kylo Ren deflects each one with practiced ease with the lightsaber’s beam. _This is a game to him_ , she thinks in terror as she continues to fire. He’s playing with her like a lothcat would before going in for the kill.

She must have fired a dozen shots that he then deflected before he tires of the game. He raises a hand and holds it towards her, palm outward.

She tries to run, but it’s no use. Her legs refuse to respond. All she can do is stand there motionless among the trees, hearing the distant sounds of screaming and blaster-fire from the battle below as he leisurely makes his way towards her.

He halts an arm’s length away from her, studies her face from behind his mask. When he finally speaks, he sounds at once impressed and amused.“Attempted murder is hardly a way to greet one’s husband after months apart.”

“Why wouldn’t I kill you?” she replies defiantly, relieved to find her mouth and lips still work. Her next words are a gamble, just a suspicion. “You’ve just committed genocide.”

He pauses. “What happened to the Hosnian system was a… _regrettable_ necessity. The New Republic was weak and ineffectual. It needed to die.” As he speaks, he walks slowly around her paralyzed body. Terrified, she tries to follow him with her eyes but her head won’t turn.

“You’re _afraid?_ ” he murmurs. “I should be the one who should be scared. You speak of me as though I am a barbarian but _you’re_ the one who shot first.”

Having circled her, he takes a step closer. Reaching up slowly, he gently touches her face. The pressure he applies is not physical, but he doesn’t try to reach into her mind. He reaches into the bond that runs between them, brings her attention to their force signatures that collectively form the thread that holds them together.

“As I suspected— your Force abilities are awakening. All this power, just biding its time and waiting to be unleashed. And you go to the Resistance and not to me? I can teach you, Rey, they can’t.”

“The Jedi Luke Skywalker will teach me far better than _you_.” It is spite that fuels her response more than anything else.

Truthfully, Rey isn’t sure she even wants to be instructed in the ways of the Force. Her experiences with Force users were darksiders like Darth Sidious, Snoke, and Kylo Ren— monstrous beings determined to inflict pain and suffering on those around them. She suspected lightsiders were better, but hadn’t her instructors taught her that the Jedi rejected love and affection? That they lived their entire lives peacefully but _alone_?

Despite her self-imposed hermitage on Jakku, Rey doesn’t want to live her entire life without knowing what it is to love.

“Ah,” he says, his grip on her face tightening, the leather of his gloves pressing into the skin of her cheek almost to the point of discomfort. “So you’ve seen the map. Good. **_Sleep_**.”

His command has all the power of the Force behind it, and Rey is helpless to the wave of sleep that overtakes her. The last thing she hears is the roar of an oncoming fleet, and catches one brief glimpse of an X-wing fighter before slipping into unconsciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> our lovebirds have reunited at last! any predictions on how the interrogation scene is going to go?


	9. Interrogation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short recap: Rey left her Resistance friends and bartered for passage to the Outer Rim, but when the First Order began its attack on the planet she ran back to help her friends, but encountered Kylo Ren in the forest and was captured.

Rey wakes up slowly. It takes effort to dispel the fog that covers her thoughts, and she’s disoriented when she finds herself in a dark room. Then she tries to move her hands, to move at all, and she discovers she’s held upright and at an angle in some kind of complex restraining apparatus. That wakes her up fast. And when she looks in front of her, _really_ looks in front of her, she sees the reflection of the light against a metal helmet that she recognizes immediately, she would know it anywhere. Kylo Ren stands in front of her.

“Hello Rey,” he says, and instead of the hostility she expected, she hears gentleness in his modulated voice. Hostility she can handle, but she’s not sure what to make of this.

“Where am I?” She asks, looking around the room and not seeing anything familiar. The forest on Takodana is gone. There are no viewports in the room. There’s barely enough light to see him, and she knows the answer to the question moments after she’s asked it. She’s on a First Order ship, or one of their bases, or even back on Exegol, in a room she doesn’t recognize.

Trapped. The chair holds her just as firmly as his hold over her using the Force did on Takodana. She can’t move, she’s completely at his mercy. The power imbalance between them couldn’t be more clear. Her heart is beating fast now, her breath coming quicker as a deep panic begins to set in. She’s trapped.

The world shrinks, the distance between her and Kylo Ren seemingly evaporates. He could keep her like this indefinitely if he wanted to, she thinks. He could wheel her onto a ship and take her back to Exegol strapped to this _kriffing_ chair and there’d be _nothing_ she could do. Nothing.

“Does it matter where you are?” He says calmly, dodging her question and making her heart race with the possibilities. She could be on Exegol already. _How long was she out for?_ “You’re my guest.”

 _His guest? I don’t want to be his anything_ , she thinks. Panic rising in her chest, it’s getting harder to breathe now, taking in each breath of air feels useless, like she’s filling up her lungs with the vacuum of space. She tells herself can’t hyperventilate, can’t give into the fear, not in front of him.

“If this is how you treat your guests,” She swallows hard and makes a deliberate effort to stop taking in air like she’s drowning. She looks down at the restraints pointedly and musters some bravado that she definitely doesn’t feel. “I think we have some work to do before we can have anyone over for dinner, husband.”

With frightening ease, he waves casually in her direction. The restraints fall away from her arms, and she fails to resist heaving in big breaths of relief. The rising panic subsides just a bit, just enough for her thoughts to clear. She was seconds away from begging him loosen them.

Before he can comment on her choice of words, on her calling him _husband_ , she speaks. Her voice is too hurried for her taste, too transparent. “Where are the others? The ones who were fighting with me?”

She can practically hear him sneering behind the mask. “You mean the traitors, murderers, and thieves you call your friends? What if I told you they were all killed, righteously slain in battle?”

He’s trying to bait her, Rey realizes. Hadn’t Finn said that the First Order considered him worse than a Resistance fighter? They would want to make an example out of him. At the very least, Kylo Ren would want her to see him bloodied and bruised. She had made friends with the traitor, had helped him and the droid escape. She didn’t doubt he had footage of it. He’d want to parade his victory in front of her to satisfy his own ego.

No, she decides finally. He doesn’t have anything. The First Order might have even lost the battle on Takodana. Hadn’t the last thing she heard before he had rendered her unconscious been the roar of an incoming fleet? Hadn’t she seen Resistance X-wing ships fly overhead?

“Then I wouldn’t believe you.” Rey says resolutely. “You lost the battle on Takodana, didn’t you?”

She doesn’t intend to goad him, she can’t help it, but suddenly he’s close, right up next to her face. She sees more detail of his helmet than she’s ever seen before, notices the dents and scratches and the score marks of battle. She manages to suppress the abrupt rise of her fear. The man she’s married to is a murderer.

“I wouldn’t say we lost.” He says, a gloved hand reaching out to hold her chin. His grip is firm but not unyielding. “I captured something of great value.”

 _Something_. His choice of words does not escape her.

She wrenches her chin away from his grip, a futile endeavor considering he could have just as easily reasserted himself and forced her into submission. He doesn’t grip her chin again, but he doesn’t back away either. It doesn’t make her feel any better. She hates this man, hates that she’s bound like this to such a monster, hates the way he so quickly oscillates between gentleness and ruthless cruelty. It makes her head spin and her heart race and she hates it, hates him.

He must hear her thoughts, that or he sees it in her face. “You’re horrified of me,” he murmurs softly, a touch of disappointment in the modulated voice.

Outraged at his complete apparent disconnect from reality and high on adrenaline, tact and _self-preservation_ are thrown to the wind. “You’re surprised?” The manic laugh that spills out of her, a byproduct of panic and fear and the sheer obliviousness of his statement isn’t a thing she can control.

“ _Of course I’m terrified of you_. You’ve been hunting me for months because you think we’re destined to conquer the galaxy together. I just saw you annihilate an entire _system_. If committing genocide is your strategy to gain my affection you should’ve married my grandfather,” she says, and wonders what she’s _supposed_ to feel. What reaction had he wanted from her if not fear?

The adrenaline of the situation had peaked, and as it subsides she realizes belatedly what she’d done. She just spoken back to a man that has the largest military force at his disposal, who had just shown he was willing to destroy trillions of people for his cause. His potential responses flashed through her mind, each more violent than the last.

He doesn’t do what she expects. He reaches up, unlatches and removes his mask.

She stares.

She hasn't seen his face in so long, had almost forgotten what he looks like beneath the mask. She had almost forgotten how expressive his face is, how unusually enchanting. She definitely does not let herself think that he’s handsome. 

He’s so _close_.

With the mask off he feels even closer than before. She can feel the heat of his skin, can count the moles and freckles on his face, can feel the intensity of his gaze, can smell the mint on his breath. Had he brushed his teeth before coming to her?

“I—” Kylo seems at a strange loss for words, shifting his eyes across her face. Almost nervous. “I don’t want to terrify you.”

Searching her face, her reply is instant. “Then what _do_ you want?”

“Rey,” he says, and does he sound more breathless than he had before, or is she imagining it? His eyes dart down to glance at her lips. He opens his mouth to say something but closes it, seems to change course at the last possible moment. His expression tightens with determination.“I want— I _need_ the map to Skywalker. ”

She would have fought a rancor with her bare hands for the ability to read his thoughts just then.

The mention of the map manages to shake Rey out of whatever trance she had been in. She wrenches her eyes away from his face and looks resolutely into the darkness. “I’m sorry,” she says, and the words sound odd coming out of her mouth. She doesn’t know where they come from. What is she sorry for? “I can’t give it to you.”

He sighs and stands up, sounding resigned and disappointed. “I would have preferred to avoid this. I’ll try to be gentle, but I _will_ take what I need.”

Heart beating faster, she remains motionless and silent, still staring resolutely into the darkness of the room. He touches her again, like he had a few minutes ago and before that, during their Force bond moment in the Star Destroyer on Jakku. His gloved hand caresses her face, and he hesitates for a moment before beginning to probe into her mind. His gentleness is a facade, she reminds herself, it isn’t _real_ , he’s just like Darth Sidious on the inside.

Rey knows what is coming. She’s experienced it many times before.

Ever since she could remember, Rey has never been especially strong in the Force. This had been an enormous disappointment to the Emperor, who refused to accept it and tested her twice, sometimes three times a year. He would place her in extraordinarily dangerous scenarios and insist that she had to use the Force to save herself. He had called them trigger events, and they had never worked. She had nearly died more times than she could count.

For several of them, Darth Sidious had probed her mind and dug out the worst of her memories, forcing her to relive them for days on end. She had seen her parents die thousands of times. Relived it in a way that holovids could never capture. She had felt the grief all over again, seen the lightsabers from her grandfather’s Sith Eternal warriors cut them to pieces in front of her while Grand Admiral Rae Sloane held her back. They had been trying to save her, had been trying to escape Exegol, and he had killed them for it.

Rey has never been especially strong in the Force, but what she does have she’s funneled exclusively into buiding mental barriers. They don’t stop Force users like Darth Sidious, she knew she’d never get that good, but it had distracted him briefly (the first time he probed her mind and found her strange project he had called it _quaint_ and been impressed at her resourcefulness before having her beat within an inch of her life for the insolence). It might buy her several hours, maybe even days, from Kylo Ren.

Rey doesn’t have raw power, but her time on Exegol had taught her to be clever where she couldn’t be strong, to be cunning when she lacked firepower.

So Rey had designed the inside of her mind like a maze. A labyrinth of constantly changing corridors and rooms. The layout only made sense to her. Thoughts and memories aren’t organized chronologically, or connected by emotion. She’d designed it to be purposefully confusing for any would-be invader.

Inconsequential thoughts are kept on the outskirts of the maze. Songs she heard on the HoloNet, endless daily routines of scavenging on Jakku, or long walks across the dunes. Randomly chosen memories serve as doors to others. In the center of the maze, she keeps her innermost thoughts and things she wants to keep hidden from the world, like the map to Luke Skywalker.

Kylo Ren breaches the first barrier of her mind, and pauses. She feels him rifling through the memories she’s placed on the surface.

“What is this?” He whispers, confused. “This organizational structure, it makes no sense. Where are the rest of your memories?” He rifles through a few more, then finds the first door that leads him to the second level of the maze.

_Rey wipes the sweat off of her brow with her forearm as she hauls the large makeshift solar panel onto the hot skyward facing side of the downed AT-AT, wishing not for the first time that the recent sandstorms hadn’t forced her to construct this inside as opposed to on-location. The whole assembled piece is longer than she is tall, and at least as heavy as she is if not more. Once on the hull, she takes time to secure the panel in place with screws and cable ties. Then, she begins attaching all the wires together, and grins when the solar panel comes to life and begins collecting power._

_Thrilled, she rushes inside to make sure her battery packs are collecting the power, and once they’re a third full and steadily climbing, she crosses her fingers and turns on the small fan she had built and set up to hang above her hammock. She lets herself fall down into the ropes, closes her eyes and grins as the cool air washes over her face._

_Her broad smile fades into a different memory, she’s younger here, her face more jaunt and features more angular. She’s sitting on a hard stone floor surrounded by metal parts. Her back is leaning up against her bed and she’s fiddling with a clunky mass of metal, screwing in some final bits with a screwdriver. A switch activates and the mass springs to life, three small wheels at the base of the structure spinning in the air._

_Gingerly, the younger Rey sets the droid down on the stone floor and gives it a small smile. “Hello,” she says in a soft whisper._

_“Hello! Hello!” The droid’s large optical sensor blinks up at her and spins in a full circle to test its wheels. “Hello!”_

_“I’m Rey,” she whispers, “what would you like to be called?”_

_“Hello Rey! Hello!” The droid chirps, but then it’s wheels stop spinning and it falls on it’s side. “Helloooo…” The end of the word is drawn out low and electronic as the droid fails, and Rey purses her lips and picks up the screwdriver, determined to at least have one being she could call a friend._

“You’ve been so lonely,” Kylo murmurs sadly as he searches for yet another door as if he too is familiar with what it is like to be without a single being in the galaxy to turn to.

He searches for yet another door, but takes the time to watch another memory, this one of her on Exegol. It’s after one of the tests, but she’s young, no older than ten, and she’s overcome with fear and struggling to sleep. The wounds she’s taken _ache_ and her blankets don’t dispel the ever-present chill. “So afraid. At night, desperate to sleep, you’d imagine your escape.” He says it all with irritating calm, almost in a trance as he watches her memories with hunger, like he can’t get enough of her, like he wants to know everything there is to know.

She squirms in the chair, trying to back away from him.

_Rey slips through the servant’s passageways of the fortress purposefully, keeping her head down but not slowing her stride. The corridors are full of staff and stormtroopers, all busy with various tasks related to the royal wedding. She might have a few more minutes until Kylo Ren knocks on her door, expecting her to let him in and their wedding night activities to ensue. Rey slips quickly through a lesser-used door, and enters the ancient antechamber that leads to the amphitheater. From the antechamber, she’ll be able to sneak out onto the surface and steal his ship. She presses her back against an enormous statue of some bygone Sith lord and peers around the corner, expecting to see two guards watching the exit, but finds none._

_No guards watching one of the only paths to the surface? Her eyes narrow, and she peeks out from the tall ankle of the statue to look again, but still nothing. It’s unusual, but perhaps not unheard of? She steels her resolve, she’s so close, and dashes for the exit, her heart in her throat, fully expecting to be caught and pulled aside and dragged back to her bedchambers. But she isn’t. No one is there to stop her, and she makes her way to the surface unhindered._

_Night has fallen on Exegol, and the landscape is an endless void of black save for the occasional burst of lightning, when the stark waste comes into relief. Rey’s stolen servant slippers aren’t much form of protection on the rocky surface, but her feet are flying, and she sprints towards Kylo Ren’s ship at a dead run. It’s close now, she’s nearly three quarters of the way there, and she can taste freedom on the tip of her tongue, oh it’s so close._

_A shot of blaster-fire just misses her shoulder, and it hits the cracked stone with a sizzle. She turns, just barely, to notice a squadron of First Order Stormtroopers coming up from behind her. More worrying still is the sight of one of Kylo Ren’s knights, Kuruk, carrying his multi-barreled lightsaber rifle._

_The ship’s shields would be enough to withstand a few shots from Kuruk’s rifle, but if he hit her with one of those plasma bolts? She’d never leave the planet._

_Rey runs even faster now, closing the distance between her and the ship fast. The Stormtroopers lag behind, even with their training the oppressive gravity of the planet and the weight of their armor drags them down._

_She hauls open the hatch of the ship and climbs inside, flying through a pre-flight sequence. She had successfully completed the hardest TIE fighter scenarios on her flight simulator just this past week, and spent the minutes of her spare time today running through flight sequences. She knows this. She can do this._

_“I can do this,” she mutters to herself, lifting the craft partially into the air and firing blaster cannons at the troopers just as they raise their blasters to open fire on her. Then, the craft jerks sharply to one side, almost crashing into the earth. Kuruk. She isn’t all the way in the air yet, still relying on the landing gear. That’s going to be a serious problem when she tries to land._

_With effort, Rey gets the ship under control and lifts all the way into the air. She accelerates perhaps a bit too fast, but oh this ship moves when she tells it to, responds beautifully under her touch. The ship sails above the massive fortress and into the sky at what feels like record speed._

_The ship’s comms buzz, and Kylo Ren’s voice crackles through the speakers. “Princess,” he says calmly, but he’s too calm, and she can hear the fury boiling just underneath the veneer. “What are you doing?”_

_“What does it look like?” She asks, coy and filled with glee as she pushes the ship through the planet’s atmosphere. There are over a dozen TIE fighters on her tail but none close enough to catch her now. “I’m stealing your ship and leaving the planet.”_

_“You can’t just—”_

_“Oh?” She asks, tapping into the navigation console and reprogramming it to hyperspace skip. “Watch me.”_

The mind probe is _painful_. A single tear streams down her face from the effort she’s making to fight him off. He lifts up a hand and holds her still using the force, and wipes the errant tear from her cheek with a tenderness that hurts more than the mind probe because she knows it isn’t real, it doesn’t come from a place of love but a place of possession.

“This could be over right now, Rey, and all you would have to do is show me the map.”

He lets up on his hold just enough to let her speak. She gathers up the saliva in her mouth and spits at him, watches with a dark satisfaction as it drips down his face. He looks positively furious.

“ _I’m not giving you anything_ ,” she hisses, positively feral and her heart full of hate. His hold doubles and she’s frozen again.

“Fine.” He grits out. “If that’s the way it’s going to be. Fine.”

He takes a deep breath and starts again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh kylo, you beautiful idiot. 
> 
> (should I do more chapter recaps?)


	10. Facsimile of a Throne

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> quick recap: Rey woke up in the interrogation room, snapped a bit at her husband because he's clueless, and Kylo began invading her mind because he's too dramatic to be a communicative and understanding partner. We saw two flashbacks that gave us a bit of a glimpse into Rey's background, and we ended the chapter with Rey spitting in his face. 
> 
> Ah, young love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Trigger Warning**
> 
> The first scene of this chapter has more explicit descriptions of abuse and loss of bodily autonomy/being under someone else's control than we've seen previously.
> 
> If this bothers you or makes you uncomfy, skip to "Hours have passed now,"
> 
> ** edited on July 8th, 2020 to incorporate the vision, you'll know what I mean later ;) **

**_Roughly Two Standard Years Ago_ **

_Rey stands next to the Emperor’s throne, dressed in her finest gown, a black number made of spidersilk that bares her slim shoulders and flares out at her hips before trailing on the floor. Finery like this is made to make her look pretty and run slow, meant to fashion her into the perfect decorative object for her grandfather’s palace. It’s beautiful, and the fabric feels whisper-soft under her hands, but she’d burn it and all her other fine dresses to ashes if she could. She’d burn the whole place down and she’d never look back._

_None of this shows on her face, but she does not fear thinking the thoughts. The Emperor knows of her hatred for him and abandoned the thought of molding her into his apprentice very early on in her life. Still, any outward appearance of dissent is unacceptable, so she stays perfectly still, her expression completely blank, as the newcomer strides down the long hall leading to the throne. Her stillness is helped in large part by the vice-like Force hold the Emperor has over her entire body, only giving her leave to breathe when he chooses. It is a power move at its core, a reminder that she holds no power here, that he could kill her at a moment’s notice and without any effort._

_The newcomer is alone, though she heard six others of his kind arrived on the planet last night through the servants gossip. The Emperor’s court stand on both sides of the enormous hall, Sith lords, ladies and notable Imperial military watching the newcomer, some with avid interest, others cool detachment._

_The figure dressed in all black does not spare a single moment to take in his surroundings, to turn to admire the Sith history painted on the walls, nor the symbolism of the two pillars on either side of the room— each representing a core tenet of the Sith religion. Nor does he look up, to take in how the walls and the pillars are so tall, the darkness of the ceiling so all-consuming, that one cannot reliably determine where the the room ends. Whoever this stranger is, he is unfazed by a room designed entirely to intimidate as he approaches the throne._

_Rey takes the stranger in, he is tall and broad shouldered, his sheer presence intimidating in its own right. A glimpse of shiny silver catches her eye, the hilt of a lightsaber. An apprentice, then? Had her grandfather finally found a suitable replacement for the role she had been born to play?_

_She can’t help but wonder what he looks like underneath the mask. Is he a human? Some monster of a man like her grandfather, or is he something else?_

_The newcomer kneels deeply, and a Sith Lord announces the Emperor with a Force-enhanced voice that carries across the hall. “His Supreme Majesty, Darth Sidious of the House Palpatine, the first and last of his name, the All-Knowing, the Reborn, Lord Emperor of the Sith Imperium, Supreme Lord of the One Sith, and rightful ruler of the galaxy.”_

_Having been introduced, the Emperor speaks. “Welcome, Kylo Ren, Master of the Knights of Ren, to Exegol. I have been waiting for you.”_

_“It is an honor, your Supreme Majesty, to finally put a face to the voice I have heard for so long.” The modulated voice is jarring, unexpected._

_The Emperor leans forward on his throne, props his elbows up on the arm rests and sets his chin between steepled fingers.“Yes, your training has been long. Trust me when I tell you it has not been without purpose. All will be revealed.” He grins, and the sight of his too-sharp teeth is an unsettling contrast to his otherwise middle-aged face. Her grandfather claps both hands, and addresses the court at large but does not take his eyes off of Kylo Ren. “Tonight we shall celebrate our honored guests, and the future of the Final Order!”_

_And Rey remains standing next to the throne while the rest of the court makes their way out of the throne room at the dismissal underlying the announcement. Rey, not having regained control over her legs, apparently is meant to stay._

_Once the final courtier has left the throne room, the great doors falling shut behind them, the Emperor waves his hand casually at Kylo Ren. “Dispense with that ridiculous thing.”_

_After a moment’s hesitation, Kylo Ren removes his helmet._

_Her heart stops beating in her chest because she_ knows _him, she_ knows _this face. She had seen him in a dream, two years ago, just after her sixteenth birthday. And he had pulled her close and called her beautiful and his touch had been gentle, his words soft. She had felt those dark waves in her fingers, had felt those lips onher skin, had played over and over in her mind what it was to be touched by him._

_“Kylo Ren, allow me to introduce Princess Rey Palpatine, my granddaughter.” His tone of voice does not speak of her as an afterthought (like usual) but of someone important, someone useful. She doesn’t even hear him speak, she’s too busy staring, too busy remembering._

He had held her like she was worth something, _and that had been everything to her. She had clung to that dream every day since, stored it away in that small part of her that was still hopeful and naive, that still fantasized about leaving this place one day._

_And it’s like waking up and losing him all over again when she realizes that he’s just like Palpatine, cut from the same dark cloth. The grief hits her like a punch to the gut, and if the Emperor wasn’t holding her up she thinks she’d collapse. Her vision swims and she feels that dark surge of loneliness, creeping in like the freezing cold, sneaking into all of those empty places in her soul._

_She had allowed herself to fall in love with a man from a dream and it turns out he’s_ real _, that he’s a monster—_

_Her legs are suddenly released from her grandfather’s Force hold and she is pushed forward, down the steps of the dais and directly before Kylo Ren, barely regaining her senses in time to fold herself into what she hopes is an adequate curtsy as she shakes like a leaf. Rey’s eyes are downcast as she curtsies, her hair falling over her face just slightly._

_She wants to run back to her room and sob into her blankets because_ how could she have been so stupid? _Of_ course _she couldn’t have a single good thing. The dream had probably been put into her mind by Palpatine, another trick, a devastating torture that had taken years to come to fruition. It would fit, she thinks. It’s exactly the kind of thing he would do._

_But dread is twisting in her gut because the Emperor has never taken the time to make such personal introductions as this. Is this another test? Is he meant to kill her?_

_Her gut sinks. Her thoughts race. Rey can think of a million things worse than death, all of them made even worse by_ him _doing it._

 _Once she rises from her curtsy, the newcomer presses the back of her hand to his lips, and they’re warm and soft and_ just like she remembers _._ It stings. _He probably knows about the dream, is probably mocking her in his head right now, laughing at her stupidity._

 _What have the servants and the other courtiers told him about her? That she’s quiet, diminutive but pretty? That she’s the Emperor’s greatest disappointment? That her parents had been pushed together for only one reason,_ her _, and she hasn’t even managed to live up to the_ one _purpose in life she was born to have?_

_“Princess,” he murmurs against her skin, and his real voice is deep and smooth. It’s then that she sees the unadulterated passion in his eyes, the fire._ _Rey swallows, and doesn’t dare speak. She wants to puke._

_“I have long since known,” The Emperor begins, “that this body would begin to fail me. I searched the Force for an answer and I saw the two of you. Together, you will cement my legacy. Together, you will destroy the last of the Jedi and forge a new empire that will last for a thousand years. The two of you will carve the Palpatine name into the very foundation of the future—”_

_And all at once, Rey understands, and the blood in her veins turns to ice._

No, no, no, _she thinks,_ not like this, not like this, anyone but him—

* * *

Hours have passed now, and they are still in the interrogation room.

Kylo Ren has stopped holding her still, a power she thinks drains too much of him if used for long periods, and is pacing the small room. She wonders if this is the longest interrogation he’s ever done. She suspects they are at least coming close. He seems sufficiently exasperated that this might be the only interrogation in which he no longer anticipates succeeding. The thought of besting her husband gives her a dark sort of pleasure, but she's too exhausted to fully appreciate it.

“There shouldn’t be this many levels,” he growls at her, frustrated. “I know how you’ve organized your mind. It’s a maze. I’ve passed through countless doors and am still not at the center. This shouldn’t be _possible_. You have enough memories for two or three full _lifetimes_. You’re only, what, nineteen? Twenty?”

She stays silent. He stares at her hard. Then he wrenches himself away, begins pacing again while making gestures with his hands that suggest mental arithmetic and muttering to himself in a language she doesn’t recognize.

He stops. Tilts his head for a moment and considers. His long legs cross the distance between them in one single step.

“Some of the memories aren’t real,” he realizes, nose almost touching hers as she stares into her eyes, searching for answers. “They can’t be, there are too many.” The realization wipes the anger from his face and plain shock takes it’s place.

It’s both. She’s created copies of each memory and altered them just slightly, just enough for him to never have been able to tell the real map (if he had ever found it) from the half-dozen altered copies.

He looks at her in awe, openly impressed,and she resists the urge to bare her teeth in a wild grin because _he had underestimated her_. Had he thought her dumb? Married her just because she had a pretty face and because her grandfather had demanded it of him? Oh, she’d make him regret the day he first lay eyes on her. 

“How did you do this? To come up with the concept alone— I _never_ would have thought this was possible.” 

“You weren’t raised by Darth Sidious, either.” Rey snaps, and she’s half-delirious at this point, exhausted, hanging on to consciousness by sheer force of will. When had she last eaten? She didn’t even remember. “Who even are your parents, anyway?” She asks dazedly when she realizes she doesn’t know, and looks up at him squinting. “You know, you almost remind me of—”

“Stop.” He says abruptly, his voice a growl, a warning. But she presses on instead, and looking deep within herself she finds the bond that ties them both together. She follows it, a thicker thread bridging their minds than she would have expected, but it leads her straight to him.

His face draws close together, confused at sensing her presence so close to him. “How—”

She follows the thread deeper, and Kylo Ren presses forward with the probe, senses that he’s close to the map. She feels him shift his perception towards it, and then he stops. Blinks once, then twice. He pushes, hard, and so does she.

A look of amazement replaces the fear and hatred on her face when she finds herself inside _his_ mind. And _oh_ , she thinks, looking around at his thoughts and memories, so haphazardly organized, _what a strange and dangerous place it is_. This must be what it’s like to have brute force and not have the need for complex mental mazes and traps. Everything is right here, right in front of her.

Life must be so different for those with power.

She’s drawn to something intimately familiar, something right on the surface of his consciousness. _Fear_.

“You,” she hears herself saying clearly, all the exhaustion gone from her voice. “You’re afraid.” He tries to fight against her but all his fears are so close to the surface, so intertwined, and she rattles them off all in a rush without thinking. “Afraid that you’ll never be as powerful as Darth Vader, as Darth Sidious, afraid you don’t have the strength to kill your father— _Han Solo is your father?_ ”

He bares his teeth at her and pushes back harder, but she’s inside his mind now, has tunneled herself deep into his thoughts. There’s something else, something he doesn’t want her to see. A thought about _her_.

“What are you hiding from me?” she asks, and as soon as she pushes deeper his resistance increases. Rey pushes his mental efforts aside with her own, it takes barely a thought. She swats him aside like one might an annoying fly. His mind is organized such that the efforts he’s put behind hiding this particular thought from her leaves a trail that leads her straight to it.

“You feel… all alone in the galaxy, and you’re afraid I’ll never—”

She sees a vision, then. His memory of it appears to her like a painting in water, constantly shifting and fading at the edges into emptiness. The center of the vision is crystal clear, crisp and sharp and expertly detailed.

Kylo Ren sits on a facsimile of her grandfather’s throne, dressed in regal black robes, a jagged black and silver crown atop his head. He is every bit the picture of a king— with a sharp jawline, high cheekbones and a head of dark, wavy hair that brushes whisper-soft over the top his shoulders.

A beautiful woman is draped over his lap, his hand possessively curled around her waist. She’s dressed in a gown that must have been spun from the stars themselves— layers and layers of gemweb and gossamer, shot through with diamonds to create the illusion of a night sky against the black fabric underneath. Loose chestnut curls drape over her bared shoulders. The woman turns and kisses Kylo full on the mouth, her elegant fingers digging fiercely into the depths of his hair. The hand he has wrapped around her waist brings them even closer together, and his other hand reaches up to hold the back of her head, thumb caressing her cheek in the soft gesture of a lover. He looks at her like she is a miracle. And when the woman ends the kiss to turn over her shoulder to look at Rey, it is her own face that looks back at her. The same dark brown eyes, the same lips, the same straight nose. It’s like looking into a warped mirror, a glimpse of what could have been. What he hopes might still be.

The galaxy is _theirs_.

In the interrogation room, Kylo pulls away sharply as if she’s slapped him. Gasping, Rey is jarred back to reality, the connection between them abruptly broken.

Confused, rattled, his cheeks burning red, Kylo stumbles back. He grabs his helmet from the table and runs out the door. She is too shocked to do anything but stare.

At the last possible moment, he gestures powerfully in her direction and the restraints that held her wrists snap back into place. And then he’s gone.

Rey is left alone in the room and she’s too dazed and tired to consider what she’s seen in his mind, has run on fumes for too long. As soon as her head hits the platform, she’s out cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oof wow kylo, way to make it obvious you haven't gotten laid in like two years, oof buddy


	11. Jedi Mind Trick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lots of small scenes while we set up for the end of this first arc!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short recap: The interrogation continued and Rey turned the probe around on him and saw Kylo's vision of their future. She discovered that he's the son of Han Solo and passed out from exhaustion shortly thereafter.

In the main conference room of the Resistance base on D’Qar, the leaders of the resistance are assembled around a three-dimensional map of an isolated, frozen planet. General Leia Organa, Poe Dameron, C-3PO, Han, Finn, Statura, and Ackbar all look grim.

“The scan data from Captain Snap Wexley’s reconnaissance flight confirms everything Finn has told us,” Poe announces to the group, sparing the former Stormtrooper a firm nod of respect. 

Wexley speaks up. “They’ve built a new kind of hyperspace weapon within the planet itself… Something that can fire across interstellar distances in the equivalent of real time.” His expression goes beyond incredulity, a somber type of shock only achieved from witnessing a genocide perpetrated from light years away. A shared feeling of dread settles over the group. “I’ve had my share of technical training, but I can’t even imagine how this is possible.”

Finn speaks up, eager to fill in the blanks and be as useful as he can. “I heard rumors that it doesn’t even operate in normal hyperspace, it fires through a hole in a continuum that it creates. Officers were calling it ‘sub’-hyperspace.”

Wexley nods slowly. “Our analysts are thinking the weapon rapidly overheats the planetary core, causing it to implode, but we’re still not sure how they’re inducing it. I want to emphasize, though, that this is not another Death Star.”

The captain presses a button on the console, and the projection of a Death Star appears beside the frozen world, almost microscopic in comparison. Some of the senior officers let out a sharp exhale of shock. “This is much worse.”

“How can they power a weapon of such magnitude?” Leia asks, a grim line to her features as she remembers the destruction of Alderaan. 

Half of the heads in the room turn to Finn, but he hesitates, unsure of himself and reluctant to be wrong.

The General sees his hesitation and is quick to prompt him. “Finn, if you have something to contribute, even if you think it might not be true, share it. You have the most up-to-date insider knowledge of the First Order than anyone else here.”

“I’m not sure of the authenticity of the information,” he says as a disclaimer. “But I was assigned to Starkiller Base, rotated around multiple duty stations across the planet. The weapon actually runs _through_ the planetary core.”

Murmurs of disbelief rise from those gathered around the projection console, and even the General looks surprised. 

“As I understand it,” Finn continues, “enormous arrays of specially designed energy collectors use the power of a star to attract and send dark energy to a containment unit at the core of the planet. There, the energy builds up until the weapon is fired.”

“That’s not possible,” Admiral Ackbar insists, “We know there’s more dark energy in the universe than anything else, and that it exists everywhere around it, but it is so diffuse that it can barely even be detected, let alone _concentrated_.”

Finn shrugs, pushing down the discomfort he feels at disagreeing with someone of higher rank. This is the First Order, he reminds himself. “They’ve found a way.”

Statura is the first of those gathered to realize the gravity of the implications in what Finn is saying. “If this is true… they would have access to an almost literally infinite source of energy. The First Order could have the ability to destroy every system that stands in their way, even halfway across the galaxy. Their power projection abilities are now essentially limitless.”

“Okay,” Han says, nodding, covering his fear with a well practiced shield of bravado. “So how do we blow it up?” The attention in the room shifts to him, but he shrugs, a knowing expression on his face. “I don’t care how big and impossible it is; if the past sixty-odd years have taught me something it’s that there’s _always_ a way to blow it up.”

He waits for suggestions, but the room is silent. 

“Han is right,” Leia says snapping out of her shock, “We have to act, and we have to act now. This is the moment that counts, everything we’ve ever fought for is at stake. We don’t have much time, we’ve detected an enormous quantity of dark energy surging towards the world. That can only mean one thing,”

She pauses. “They’re loading the weapon again. And we can all take a guess as to what their next target will be.”

* * *

  
  


There is as much disbelief in Supreme Leader Snoke’s voice as there is disappointment. “She resisted _you_? An untrained girl?”

Kylo works his jaw, conflicted between being impressed at his wife’s power or disappointed and frustrated at his own inability to best her. “Yes,” He grits out. “She’s untrained but _strong_ with the Force. Stronger than she knows.”

The Supreme Leader’s voice is flat, unmoved by his excuses. “I perceive the problem,” Snoke intones. “It isn’t her strength that is making you fail. It’s your _weakness_ . For all your strength, you fall into the same traps that Darth Vader did before you— surrendering to _sentiment_.”

The jab stings, even more so because the Supreme Leader is right. His feelings for Rey _had_ held him back, had prevented him from employing harsher interrogation techniques like the ones he had used with the Resistance pilot. His compassion had set him up for failure from the very beginning. 

“And where is the droid?” Snoke asks, and Hux takes the moment to cut in before Kylo can respond, clearly relishing the opportunity to provoke more of the Supreme Leader’s ire against him.

“Ren believed it was no longer of value to us, he believed the girl was all we needed, that he could obtain everything necessary from her. As a result,” Hux drags the last syllable out, shooting Kylo a vicious, clearly satisfied smirk, “it is likely the droid has been returned to the hands of the enemy.”

Snoke turns his eye from Hux to Kylo Ren, visibly angry. “You disappoint me more every day, Kylo Ren.” Kylo flinches, and Snoke’s mouth ticks upward with satisfaction before he returns his focus to Hux. “Have we located the main Resistance base?”

The officer preens a bit and stands up a bit straighter, puffing out with pride at being the bearer of good news. “We were able to track their reconnaissance ship back to the Ileenium system. We are coordinating with our own reconnaissance craft in the area in order to lock down the specific location of—

“We do not need it,” Snoke interrupts, a bloodthirsty eagerness settling in on his face. “Destroy their system.”

Hux started a bit, his blink of surprise almost audible. Catching the officer off-guard was a thing Kylo took particular joy in, and bearing witness to it was almost as good. Despite having tried too hard to look calm and composed in front of the Supreme Leader, Hux was not immune to surprise.

“The _system_? S-Supreme Leader, according to the most recent galographics, at least two and possibly three habitable worlds circle Ileenium. Our point was made in the Hosnian system, would it not be worthwhile now to simply destroy their base and claim the remainder for the Order? We will have the location of the base within a matter of hours and—”

Snoke cut him off again. “We cannot wait. Not even for hours. Hours that may permit as little as one ship to depart with the information that will allow them to find Skywalker. One ship is one ship too many. The more time we give them, the more likely the chance, however slight, that they find Skywalker and convince him to return to fold. The risk is one we cannot take. I want the entire Ileenium system destroyed.”

He thought of Rey’s look of disdain, her fury, when he had found her in the forests of Takodana.

_“Why wouldn’t I kill you?” she replies defiantly, working her jaw as if surprised he’s given her leave to use them. There’s something beyond fury in her gaze, something akin to disgust. As if he’s no better than the dirt on the bottom of her shoe. The realization settles in and sharp disappointment settles into his gut. She thinks he’s a monster._

_“You’ve just committed genocide.”_

Daring to disagree, Kylo steps forward, with the knowledge that his dissent might cost him dearly later when the Supreme Leader requested an audience with him alone, to punish him for his failures. “I can get the map from her, Supreme Leader, and that will be the end of it. I just need your guidance.”

“And you _also_ promised me that when it came to destroying the Resistance you wouldn't fail me.” The threatening figure of Snoke leans towards him, the holographic, larger-than-life representation adding to the intimidation. “Who knows if copies of the map have already been made and sent out of the system, to other, minor Resistance outposts? But those who are _most_ aware of its significance will all likely be gathered at their main base. Destroy that, destroy them, and we may at least feel a little more confident that the way to Skywalker is eradicated. Even if copies have made and exported, the annihilation of their leadership will give pause to any survivors who might dare to contemplate further resistance to us.” 

Snoke leans back now, settling into the throne. “For that reason alone I would order the destruction of the system, even if there was no assurance it would also put an end to this accursed map.” He turns to Hux, “General, prepare the weapon. I expect nothing less but the same measure of success you achieved last time.”

“Yes, Supreme Leader!” Visibly thrilled by the praise, Hux turns and strides quickly out of the hall, with all the efficiency of a man on a mission. That left Snoke to fix his eyes on its sole remaining occupant. 

“It appears that a reminder is in order, apprentice. So I will show you of the powers of the dark side. _Bring her to me_.”

* * *

Aboard the _Millennium Falcon_ , an unlikely trio are going through the stages of performing a final pre-flight checklist. Han thinks to himself that this could be the start of a joke, _so a Wookie, an old Resistance smuggler, and a former Stormtrooper walk into a bar…_ He smiles to himself, and it helps shake off the tension in his shoulders that he always gets before taking off. 

“Chewie, check the horizontal booster,” he calls out. 

A growling response makes all the tension come back. It provokes an equally terse reply from Han. “You think I _care_ what the onboard readouts say? You _know_ there’s no substitute for a final visual inspection.”

A grumble of assent from Chewie allows him to turn his attention to Finn. “Be careful with those dentons, son, they’re explosives.”

Finn stops dead in his tracks, turning to face him with wide, fear-filled eyes. “Explosives?” He asks, his voice an octave higher than usual. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Han shrugs. “Didn’t want to make you nervous. When you’ve finished loading those, go talk to the X-wing techs outside and see if you can manage to swipe us a backup thermal regulator.” 

The former stormtrooper sets down his load with the utmost care and heads out, and Han hears much softer footfalls walk up the gangplank. 

“No matter how much we fought,” Leia says, “I always hated watching you leave.”

He gives her one of his lopsided smirks, hoping it diffuses some of the tension between them. “That’s why I left,” he says, “to make you miss me.”

And for the first time in what feels like years, he hears her laugh again, a rare, infectiously happy sound that turns his smirk into a genuine smile. 

He takes a step towards his wife, hands itching with the urge to hold her, but restrains himself, unsure if she’d welcome his touch. “It wasn’t all that bad, was it? I know we argued a lot. Maybe it’s because we both have such shy, compromising personalities. Of course, if you’d only done what I said…” 

“And if you’d only done what I asked,” she ripostes, beaming up at him. 

He chuckles, and not for the first time since returning back to the base he wished he’d never left. That he’d had the courage to talk things through. “I mean, some of it was— good.” He says, remembering that brief weekend they spent on that beach before Ben had been born. _Kriff_ , he thinks, that had definitely been better than _good_.

“Pretty good,” Leia agrees, nodding. “You still drive me crazy though.”

“Crazy as in crazy good, or crazy as in borderline insane?”

She shrugs, such a casual gesture for a woman that commands a revolution. “A little bit of both,” she admits. 

Han can’t hold himself back anymore, and gingerly places his hands around her waist. Thirty years fall away in an instant. “Leia, there’s something I need to say to you.”

She blinks away tears, and puts a finger to his lips. “Tell me when you get back.”

He thinks about objecting, but they’ve argued so much over the years, and this time, this time he really might not come back. He takes her into his arms instead, folding her into a tight embrace. 

“I love you,” he whispers into her hair. 

“I know,” she says. She presses him closer for another long moment before pulling back and taking his hands into her own. “If you see our son,” she whispers, voice hoarse with everything she isn’t saying, “bring him home for me?”

Han nods. “I promise.”

* * *

  
  


_What had happened?_

Shackled and unable to move, Rey comes to on the inclined platform in her restraints, unable to stop contemplating the vision she had seen in Kylo’s mind. The vision of her, of _them_ . She had fought him, _resisted_ the probe in a way she had never done before. She had followed the threat of their connection straight into his mind and fought his attempts to regain control as if they had been _nothing_. After she had invaded his thoughts, he had pulled back, thrown so badly out of balance that he had fled the room to collect himself. He had withdrawn, but she knows he’ll be back. 

Rey realizes, for the first time, the implications of what she’d done during that interrogation. She had _invaded Kylo Ren’s_ _mind_ , Snoke’s apprentice and the Emperor’s would-be successor. He was right, her Force abilities _were_ awakening. 

She eyes the guard posted inside the front of her cell, standing at the edge of her peripheral vision. Without knowing how long she was out, and knowing for a fact that Kylo will eventually return, her first order of business has to be escaping this room. Then, somehow, figure out how to get off the kriffing planet.

Internally, Rey weighs her options, and decides to take a risk.

“You!”

The guard turns towards her, his posture excessively stiff even with the Stormtrooper armor. She studies him closely, guessing that he likely knows who she is, or rather _what_ she is, to Kylo Ren. Before he can speak, she addresses him firmly, reaching to this newly discovered well of power inside her, so deep she can’t feel its end, and attempts to channel it. 

“ _You will remove these restraints, and leave this cell with the door open, and retire to your living quarters. You will speak of this encounter to no one._ ”

The guard raises the heavy rifle and approaches her, showing no visible reaction as she shrinks back from him. Heart-pounding, she watches with shock as he methodically unlatches her shackles. _That actually worked?_

He speaks with a monotone, uninflected voice, repeating her command. “I will remove these restraints, and leave this cell with the door open, and retire to my living quarters. I will speak of this encounter to no one.” Once finished, the guard stands and starts for the doorway. 

Rey realizes her mistake at just the right moment, catching the guard before he leaves. “ _And you will drop your weapon_ ,” she says hastily. 

“And I will drop my weapon,” the guard repeats, in the same monotone as earlier, setting the rifle on the floor and departing in silence.

Once the guard is gone, there isn’t a moment left for Rey to spare. She launches herself out of the chair and snatches up the rifle.

If Kylo Ren intends to haul her back to Exegol, the least she can do is not make it easy for him.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm self-isolating because of covid-19 sooooooooooo I basically have nothing else to do other than write this! expect another chapter shortly.


	12. Weak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quick summary of last chapter: The Resistance formulate a plan to dismantle the First Order's shiny new toy, Snoke orders the destruction of the Resistance's system, Han and Leia have a cute moment, and Rey escapes the interrogation room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought I'd be able to wrap up this first arc with just one more chapter but that was clearly a lie, so here's the penultimate chapter of this first arc? I think? Who knows, honestly
> 
> A few quick notes:
> 
> \- the chapters all have names now, so that's a thing  
> \- I started hating the extra space between each paragraph so I spent a good hour and a half yesterday deleting every single one of them individually, so there's that, hopefully it's a bit less bad now, but if y'all really like em I can put them back in I guess???

Kylo bursts into the holding cell, finding it, as expected, deserted. The single, copper-hued interrogation chair, with its multiple curving restraints, sits empty. His right fist clenches to the point of pain, leather glove creaking under the pressure.

His emotions churn inside of him, brewing like an electric storm. A great deal of his education had been devoted to learning how to eschew all emotion, and as much as he resents Luke’s teachings, they have their uses. He needs every bit of that training to stay calm. As bad as Rey’s resistance had been, her ability to push into his mind was more concerning. She had learned things about him he had vowed to never tell anyone again. 

He had joined the dark side to pursue power, but he doesn’t feel powerful at all. He feels  _ weak _ .

“ _ Explain _ ,” he growls, not even turning his head to acknowledge the man beside him.

Lieutenant Mitaka audibly swallows, and Kylo can almost taste the salt in the terrified man’s sweat. “W-We have not found …” _Her majesty?_ _Princess Palpatine? Your wife?_ Mitaka flails for a moment, absent a term for the woman that is very much Kylo’s wife but lacks a proper title within the First Order hierarchy. Cautiously, he starts again. “We have not found her yet, sir. The alarm has been propagated throughout the whole base and all the troopers are on alert. I am confident we’ll find her.”

“And the trooper who was on guard?”

“Still being debriefed, sir. He doesn’t remember what happened. One minute he was at his post, at ease. The next, he found himself in his quarters, changing out of uniform. Initial assessment indicates he is telling the truth,” Mitaka hesitates before continuing, “but if you would wish to try stronger methods…”

Kylo thinks on this for a moment. It would perhaps be smart of him to order the Stormtrooper tortured, with the hope that this information would get back to the Supreme Leader and prove his strength, but such measures would likely not improve results. He might even get worse results over the long-term by reducing morale and seeding distrust within his own forces. 

With a sigh, he says, “No. Just keep questioning him. He may remember something.” His tone darkens as he thinks of what Snoke will do to him if he isn’t successful in finding his wayward wife. “She’s here somewhere. There’s nowhere for her to go. When you find her, bring her…”

To where? To Snoke, as his master demanded? Or… His right fist clenches tightly again, and he feels a sharp pain that suggests he’s drawn blood. “Bring her to me,” He finishes, before he loses the nerve to follow through with that small act of defiance. 

Unable to contain himself any longer, he thumbs his lightsaber to life. Mitaka knows this signal all too well, and quickly skitters out of the room before the blade finishes its first swing into the interrogation chair. 

Methodically, Kylo turns the entire room to rubble. He lets himself go, surrenders himself to his anger. His vision turns red, and he fails to notice himself letting out howls of outrage and frustration. Sparks from severed cables and machinery fly all around him, their flame the only things illuminating the room. 

Once finished, he heaves in heavy breaths, observing the destruction he’s wrought. He waits for the deep-seated feeling of satisfaction and his shoulders tense when it doesn’t come.

Taking the sight of his work in would have normally made him feel better. 

It doesn’t. 

* * *

  
  


The patrol droid fails to notice the trio trekking through the snow thanks to a deformation warp from a heat distorter that Chewbacca carries in his pouch to mask their thermal signatures. _It’s the only thing that’s gone right for them so far on this mission_ , Finn thinks he uses a fallen branch to wipe away their footprintsas they advance. It masks things enough, and the wind does the rest.

Han leads the way, having the coordinates for the nearest entry point with him. Where he can, he keeps them on rocky surfaces, to better hide the evidence of their travels.

Then, Finn notices a shortcut. He lengthens his stride to move up alongside Han and points to a small hatch. “There’s a flood tunnel over that ridge, we can get in that way.”

Han looks over at him. “You sure it isn’t safety screened?”

Finn shakes his head. “There’s no screen at all. A screen would defeat the tunnel’s purpose.”

Han frowns, and the suspicion the old man has harbored for hours finally makes itself known. “You said you worked here, but you never told us your specialty.”

Finn looks away, having finally been caught out. “…Sanitation.”

Han gapes, “ _Sanitation_? How do you know how to take down the shields if you’re a _janitor_?” He gestures over to Chewie’s backpack. “We’ve got enough stuff to do the job, but we have to know where to set it. We’ve only got one chance to do this right, kid. If we fail to bring their shields down, we might as well pack up and apply for First Order citizenship. And, to make things worse, everyone in the D’Qar system is going to die.” His voice lowers, almost to a growl. “My _wife_ is going to die.”

Finn swallows, and eyes the edge of the ridge they’re standing on. He wonders if one of his companions will throw him off. “I… I don’t know how to take out the shields, Han,” he admits. “I’m just here to get Rey.”

Han lets out a loud noise of frustration and turns in a slow, furious circle. “Anything else you’ve overlooked?” He snaps, and the look in his eyes makes Finn take a fearful step back away from Han and the edge of the ridge. “Anything else you’ve forgotten to tell us?”

Nearby, Chewbacca adds his own snarling comment.

“People are counting on us!” Han yells. “The _galaxy_ is counting on us!”

Finn shrugs sheepishly. “We’ll… figure it out?”

“We better,” Han snarls.

* * *

Rey thanks the stars that the First Order built their ships at such a massive scale as she ducks into a small alcove, pressing her back tightly against the wall as a squadron of stormtroopers pass her by none the wiser. Her heart races with the adrenaline, so hard she can feel it thumping in her chest, but she breathes carefully through her nose, knowing the slightest out-of-place sound could give her away.

From her spot in the alcove, she spies a stone wall, finally catching a glimpse of the edges of the base. A smile tugs at her lips, her most promising sight yet. A door to the surface can’t be much farther off. Once the squadron has turned the next corner and the hallway is clear, she dashes across the hallway and into a perpendicular corridor.

From this angle, she now sees that the the corridor ends and turns into an open-air walkway overlooking a deep chasm, with parked TIE fighters along one far side. If she can reach it, she’ll be able to hijack a ship and escape from… wherever she is. The prospect of giving her supposed “destiny” the middle finger yet again is an added bonus to regaining her freedom, and she feels relief at _finally_ having some semblance of a plan.

Rey is not particularly the type of person that likes to leave her life up to chance, or rely too heavily on improvisation. She had planned her escape from Exegol for years, and in the days leading up to her escape she had devoted an entirely separate part of her consciousness, away from the Emperor’s influence, to planning things out. Rey thrives on a plan, and hijacking a parked TIE fighter is a difficult one, to be sure, but within her reach if she’s sufficiently careful.

The open-air walkway does pose a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, however. She won’t be able to cross the walkway without risking being seen by those on the other side. A quick glance over the other side reveals a bottomless pit, its sides made of molded panels that are softly lit with thousands of lights, extending down, down, _down_ into darkness.

Have they burrowed into an entire _planet_? She huffs out a breath, suddenly knowing exactly where she is. Starkiller Base. The planet-sized weapon that had destroyed the Hosnian system.

Rey gnaws the inside of her cheek, glancing again over the edge of the railing as she reconsiders this plan. She spies tiny little shallow footholds carved into the wall of the chasm, just deep enough for her to fit her feet in. She could, in theory, vault herself over the railing (and pray to the Maker that she doesn’t fall) and use the footholds to slowly make her way over the side, but she’d still be visible to the other side, if anyone cared enough to look down that far. The thought of it isn’t exactly comforting, too many unknowns.

Perhaps she could climb up into the ventilation shafts? It’d be a tight fit, but definitely a lower chance of getting caught…

A deep chill runs through her bones, and her ears perk up to the sound of boots coming down the corridor she’s just left.

Without a second thought, she throws herself over the railing and slides down, down down, her heart in her throat, fingers trying and failing to grasp for purchase…

 _Kriff_ , she had made a mistake. She’s going to die here.

Then, finally, one hand slides into one of the shallow footholds. She heaves out a deep and shaky breath of relief.

“Did you hear that?” She hears a smooth, electronically modified voice say from above her. She recognizes the voice as Ap’lek, one of the six Knights of Ren aside from Kylo.

Unlike the rest of the Knights, Ap’lek prefers deception and psychological warfare to violence, and would frequently manipulate the thoughts and emotions of his enemies in battle. Rey had overheard stories of those who had fought Ap’lek being reduced to empty shells of their former selves, completely defeated without ever being physically wounded.

Fortunately, he had never been sent out to find her, as Brakiss and Raltharan were the more adept trackers of the group.

She is not, as one might expect, especially thrilled at the thought of having to fight him. Though she imagines that her status as Kylo Ren’s wife likely means his orders are to capture her alive and mostly intact (physically and otherwise).

“Hear what, sir?” Another voice replies, likely a stormtrooper.

Ap’lek hums, a strange noise to hear through the modifier, and she sees him rest his gauntlets over the edge and peer out over the side and into the abyss.

Rey stops breathing for fear that he’d somehow hear her, and presses herself closer to the edge of the wall. It’s at this point that she’s made acutely aware of the fact that aside from her feet in the footholds below her, her entire body weight is being held up by five fingers.

And they’re getting a bit sweaty. She’s losing her grip.

“Remind me again of where her majesty was last sighted,” Ap’lek orders as he scans the abyss, thankfully not looking down far enough so that he’d notice her clinging to the edge of the ledge, but if he moved his helmet further down just slightly…

Slowly, carefully, she snakes her other hand up the side of the wall and grasps for the foothold adjacent to her hands. The added support is sweet, sweet relief to her other hand.

“The interrogation room in section 16C, sir.”

Ap’lek hums again, the same electronic purring sound coming out of his modifier. “And where would you go, RB-8142, if you were a traitor and looking to get off of the base?”

There’s a brief pause while the stormtrooper considers. “I suppose… that I would try to steal a ship, sir.”

“Indeed,” Ap’lek replies, “the only logical way forward. But to the best of our knowledge, her majesty has no knowledge of the layout of this base, and we have yet to hear of any reports of a stormtrooper being subdued and their armor being stolen. Given those two things, how would you proceed?”

Another pause. “I… I don’t know, sir.”

Ap’lek gives a deep, disenchanted sigh. “How unfortunate.”

Then, she hears the deep thrum of a lightsaber, and the noise of the blade slicing through armor and bone. The helmeted head of what she assumes formerly belonged to RB-8142 is thrown over the railing and sails past her, skimming her left shoulder.

Rey barely manages to reign in her shriek of alarm.

“DT-9183, same question. How would you proceed?”

“I… I would use the ventilation shafts, sir. They’re big enough to fit someone of her majesty’s size, and if she were to head in one direction she would eventually reach one of the edges of the base, and from there be able to easily navigate to any one of the hangars where we store the ships.”

“The ventilation shafts, good,” she hears Ap’lek move away from the railing and stalk towards the corridor they entered from, giving orders to the squadron of stormtroopers as they exit. “I want small hover-droids deployed into the shafts, equipped with thermal imaging. We’ll find her.”

Once the sound of their boots have retreated into the distance, Rey lets herself breathe again, and ever so carefully she works her way sideways along the edge of the walkway. She moves slowly, hand over hand, shuffling her feet so the edge of her toes catch the shallow footholds.

Eventually, she reaches a service hatch slotted into the wall, and it opens silently without the need to enter a code. Entering the hatch provides her with far better handholds. With any luck, she’ll be able to move across the corresponding service area that runs underneath the TIE fighter hangar and be able to hijack a ship without drawing any unwanted attention.

 _I can do this_ , Rey thinks with determination, _I can do this_.

* * *

“Main planetary shields have gone out, sir. All across the board.”

Hux snaps his head over to the technician. “Cause? Possibly external?”

“It doesn’t show here, sir,” the tech replies.

The edges of Hux’s mouth twitches with irritation. “Send a tech squad over to shield control. Could be something as simple as a bad relay, or…”

He thought of Rey’s little wife, who had recently begun to disprove much of Hux’s earlier assumptions of her. She had proven to be quite the handful today alone, using some Jedi mind trick nonsense on one of his stormtroopers to escape her interrogation room. Of _course_ Kylo Ren’s wife wouldn’t be easily subdued, of _course_ she’d cause trouble. He should have guessed.

He’d wager a hefty amount of credits that her escape and the issue with the main planetary shields are related.

“ _Or_ , sir?” The officer next to him inquires. Hux shoots him a dark look and the officer’s mouth closes. Hux walks over to his station, where he’s able to view the outputs of any of the screens within the Central Command center of the ship, as well as monitor other essential functions.

Hux’s legs twitched with the urge to pace as he stood at his station, systematically checking and overviewing the technical readouts to ensure something external hadn’t caused the planetary shields to give out. Pacing was a habit he was trying to kick, regarding it as a waste of energy, but idly he wondered if the energy he spent repressing the urge made it worthwhile to just give in.

He made a mental note to weigh the various factors later.

“Update on the tech squad?” He calls out.

“Just getting there, sir,” replies the officer who was monitoring the situation. Hux watched as a strange expression came over the technician’s face, and he felt something sink in his gut when she looked back at him.

“Sir, the lead technician reports that the doorway has been sealed.”

Hux grimaces. “Sealed? How, and by whom?”

“He…” The officer presses a hand to her ear, adjusting the earpiece by which the tech squad is communicating with her. “He doesn’t know, sir. Heat sealed, all the way around the edge. They suspect by a blaster. Should they get a cutter?”

He shakes his head. “Tell them to blow the door.”

“Sir?” By the furrowing of the technician’s eyebrows, Hux gathers she’s unsure of whether she had heard the order correctly.

“ _Blow the damn door!_ ” Hux shouts, “Tell them to get in there!”

“Yes, Sir!” The command was relayed. And upon hearing the tech repair team’s reply, the technician swallows. “Sir, the team leader reports that there is— some damage to the shield control system. The operational capacity of the entire center has been reduced by at least ninety precent by blaster fire.”

Hux had not achieved his present rank and position by deliberating on issues and deferring situations to group consultation with the other generals. He acted decisively, and made sure things always turned out in his favor when they needed to. Above all, Hux secured his own interests, which just so happened to mostly align with the interests of the First Order.

“Bypass the shield center,” he orders. “Where redundancy doesn’t already exist, port all controls here. This event was likely deliberate and we must assume an attack is imminent. I want our shields back online _now_.”

“Yes, sir.” The officer’s fingers fly over the console at lightning speed, “It will take a moment, sir.”

Hux fidgets with his hands while waiting, all but scraping the skin off of his palms, another nervous tick he has failed to eliminate.

“Shields?”

“Not yet, sir. I have to block any remaining possible directives from the shield center so that they can’t override our efforts here. I should have it soon, sir.”

“Hurry,” Hux bites out, and turns his attention to the base’s radar and waits for the offensive he knows is coming. His legs twitch with the urge to pace.

* * *

“We’ll use the charges to blow the blast door,” Finn gestures towards the small explosives inside the duffel that Chewie’s been carrying. “The holding cells for the prisoners are down that corridor. I’ll go in and draw fire, but it’s often heavily guarded, depending on who’s being held. I’m gonna need cover.”

Han eyes him intently, his disposition towards the former stormtrooper having significantly improved since they had disabled the planetary shields. “You sure you’re up for this?”

Finn lets out a breath, shaking out his shoulders in anticipation of the fight. “No,” he says, “But this whole gamble is my call, so taking care of it is my responsibility. I’ll find Rey.” He nods, mostly to himself. “There’s a footbridge that has to be crossed. Troopers’ll be on our trail, so we should plant charges on it as we go and blow it once we’re across. It won’t prevent a pursuit, but it’ll delay ‘em, they’ll have to go around the long way. From there, we’ll use an access tunnel that’ll lead us to the main hangar.”

His expression tightens. “I just hope she’s still alive.”

Finn’s experiences with Kylo Ren had never been positive, and he had seen him destroy control panel after control panel with his lightsaber, rending the entire thing to rubble and ash in mere minutes. The thought of all of that fury, directed toward Rey… It didn’t make his stomach sit well.

Something in Han’s peripheral vision catches his eye, and he turns. Squinting, he breaks out into a broad smile and points towards a slim figure climbing up an interior shaft wall directly towards them.

“Something tells me she is,” Han says, and Finn turns to gape in astonishment, not quite able to accept what he was seeing.

Chewbacca moans in relief at not having to deal with detonating explosives in such tight quarters.

When Rey finishes climbing out, sets foot on the floor and turns towards them, she immediately raises the rifle she’s carrying in self-defense before finally recognizing the trio. A wide smile splits her features and crinkles the corners of her eyes, and she runs towards the trio, enveloping them into a large hug.

After a moment, Finn pulls her back to look her over. “Are you all right?” He asks, relieved. “What happened? Did he hurt you?”

She purposefully neglects to answer his questions, instead asking one of her own. “What are _you_ doing here?”

Han smiles softly. “This idiot over here,” he gestures towards Finn, “made us come back for you.”

Chewie pipes in, and his remark brings tears to Rey’s eyes. She tries to find something to say to that, something worthy of the sentiment and the risk they had undertaken to find her, but comes up short.

“You really came back for me?” She asks Finn, who, having never found himself in a situation like this before, also had no idea what to say. He nods.

“We’ll have a party later, kids,” Han says finally, breaking off the moment. “I’ll even bring the cake. Right now, let’s get outta here. The whole base is on high alert, apparently some high level prisoner broke out.” Han eyes Rey, “you wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone is staying safe!


	13. Turmoil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously, on A Duel of Destinies: Kylo destroyed the interrogation room Rey escaped in his last Emo Tantrum, Han, Chewie, and Finn arrived on Starkiller base and disabled the planetary defenses (thus giving the Rebellion a fighting chance at winning the battle) and Rey barely escapes a confrontation with Ap'Lek, one of Kylo's knights. Then, at last, she's reunited with the Han, Chewie, and Finn!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> remember how I said we'd finish this first arc by this chapter? hahhahahhahahaha

“High level prisoner?” Rey squeaks, eyebrows at her hairline and terrified that Han somehow knows of her connection to his son. Oh, she thinks, right, Kylo Ren is Han Solo’s  _ son _ . Does that make her… Han’s  _ daughter-in-law _ ? What a head-spinning realization, she thinks, suddenly wanting a stiff drink more than ever. She’s Kylo Ren’s wife and Han Solo’s daughter-in-law, and what next? Will her husband turn out to be a prince of some lost or forgotten civilization, too?

Han raises a brow and opens his mouth to speak, but is thankfully interrupted by the sound of a squadron of Stormtroopers approaching from the rear. They share a panicked look and race, quickly, out the exterior door.

And when the four of them come racing out onto the snow, they instantly look up. The cloudless sky gives them a perfect view of the battle above between First Order and Resistance forces. While Rey isn’t an expert in aerial warfare, she doesn’t have to be to predict the outcome of this one. TIE fighters are backed by an endless barrage of seekers, missiles with a limited on-board artificial intelligence enabling them to doggedly pursue enemies as individuals or deal out even more damage as a collective, giving the First Order an almost insurmountable advantage. There’s no hope.

They watch in silent horror as a group of seeker missiles overwhelmed a T-70 X-wing starfighter, and the ground beneath them trembles from the impact as rubble crashes into the snow. 

Rey silently curses the Resistance leadership that made the decision to launch an offensive attack on Starkiller Base, on First Order home territory. Finn, Han, and Chewie had brought her up to speed and told her about their mission to take out the planetary shields which thankfully meant the Resistance fleet wasn’t embarking on a suicide mission. But taking out the hundreds, maybe even thousands, of TIE fighters and other offensive weapons the First Order had stashed on the base?

It seems to Rey like they’re  _ asking _ to be defeated. A few well placed explosives in the hangars where the ships are stored, or even at the machinery that allows those bay doors to open… Perhaps they would have had a fighting chance.

Han turns to Finn, his expression grim. He gestures towards Chewie, “My friend here has a bag full of explosives that we didn’t use inside. It’d be a shame to make him haul them all the way back to the  _ Falcon _ ,” to which the Wookie adds a grunt of agreement. “What’s the best place we could put ‘em to use?”

Finn’s gaze turns over to the rubble of the crashed X-wing while he thinks, pausing for a moment to consider. “The oscillator is the only sensible target,” he concludes, “but there’s no way inside.”

“Yes, there is.” Rey says, remembering her days on Jakku. “I’ve seen inside these kinds of walls, the mechanics and instrumentation are the same as the Star Destroyers I salvaged in the desert. Get me to a conventional junction station and I can get us in.”

Han nods and smiles at her, “Get us in. If you can do that, we’ll be ready.”

In a few rushed minutes, they hash together the details of their plan. Han and Chewie will plant explosives all around the base while they head toward the oscillator via seldom-used droid service corridors, and she and Finn will head towards the nearby junction station and get them all inside. Finn heads out to see if there are any snow speeders to steal, and Rey moves to follow him, but Han puts a hand on her shoulder and pulls her back. He shoots Chewie a look and nods in Finn’s direction, and the Wookie grunts and moves to follow the former stormtrooper. 

“Rey,” he says slowly, “I’m going to ask you a question, and I need you to tell me the truth. Alright?”

Swallowing her nervousness and the thick blockage in her throat, she nods.  _ He knows, _ she thinks to herself. He definitely knows. “Alright,” she replies, her heart beating loudly in her chest.

“Are you married to Kylo Ren?” he asks softly.

She doesn’t trust herself to speak, so she nods instead, the movement shaky. 

Han cocks his head and looks her over, toe-to-tip, a curious look in his eye. “Huh,” he says, his brows furrowed in confusion. “And how’d that happen?”

The truth spills out like a dam breaking. “I’m the granddaughter of Darth Sidious, he arranged a marriage between us but I—”

Han puts up a hand, pausing her. “Wait wait wait, hold on,  _ Palpatine _ is still alive? He was old as dirt when I was your age, how is he— and, kriff,” his face screws up in disgust. “That grungy piece of dirt had  _ kids _ ?”

A whole host of realizations seem to dawn on him at once, and huffs out a breath through his mouth, his eyes wide. “Just imagining that makes me want to puke.”

Rey can only nod sagely. She’s been there. 

Finn and Chewie come racing back to them with a snow speeder in tow, and Finn bends over and puts his hands on his knees, heaving in big breaths.

“Think we were spotted. Gotta go!”

Han shoots her a lopsided grin as he and Chewie head for the service entrance. “Welcome to the family, kid.”

Rey’s heart skips a beat, and she gives him a tentative smile back.

A few moments later, atop the only snow speeder they were able to find, she struggles to maintain control of the unfamiliar vehicle as they race through the icy forest. Finn is seated behind her, backwards, watching for their pursuers. 

The sky is darkening fast, and it’s unlike any sunset Rey’s ever seen before. As opposed to vivid colors of a desert sky, the sun is just progressively getting dimmer. She surmises that it must be the weapon— opaque dark energy must be being drawn towards the collectors on the other side of the planet, blocking more and more of the sunlight.

“Snow is  _ cold _ _!"_ Rey yells over the roaring of the engine as she squeezes the speeder through a phalanx of willowy alien trees. Their speed, coupled with the already frigid conditions of the planet, make her acutely aware of how ill-suited her clothing is to anything but warm weather. Wraps that had been made to insulate her skin from the sand and the heat to precious little to keep the heat  _ in _ .

“Try living here,” Finn calls back, “There are only two seasons: winter, and dead of winter!”

Just as he finishes, the speeder wobbles sharply to one side. Rey switches systems on the speeder to maintain course and veers off in one direction, a second shot barely missing them. 

She hears Finn fire several shots back even as she dodges more blaster fire that threatens to finish off the already precarious speeder. 

“Got him!” Finn yells, but their moment of victory is cut short when shafts of intense purple light begin flowing towards the horizon, a curtain of energy drawn towards the weapon’s collectors. 

Neither of them say anything, and Rey presses her body tighter to the speeder and wills it to go faster.

* * *

Han allows himself to breathe a sigh of relief as the service hatch they had been monitoring finally parted to reveal a deserted corridor. _Good_ , Rey and Finn had take out the junction station. He doesn’t let himself become distracted by the revelation of her and Ben’s relationship (was that even the right word? What were the kids calling arranged marriages set up by Sith lords these days?) as tempting as it was. There would be time to ask her all the questions he wanted later.

Right now, they have a job to do. The two of them rush inside, and Chewie lets out an agitated moan.

“Yeah,” he agrees, “No kidding.”

The entire vicinity is empty. No one, organic or droid, is waiting in ambush for them. They both know it’s unlikely to remain so for long, and they quickly divide the explosives in the duffel between them.

Han gestures towards the nearest of the building’s massive support structures. “Probably better to take out a heavy hitter than these smaller support columns, so let’s aim for this one, yeah? We’ll put almost everything we’ve got on it, and save a few for the surrounding area to hedge our bet.”

Chewie responds in the affirmative, and Han nods.

“Agreed. You take the top, I’ll go below. We’ll meet back here.”

Their eyes meet, and the stare holds. But this is just one of thousands of missions they’ve done, just another day in what’s been a very dangerous life, and so nothing more is said between them. They nod stiffly, both acknowledging that this might be the last time they see each other, and then they get to work.

* * *

Kylo Ren’s jaw tics with frustration at his current situation. He is not having a particularly good day. _She_ escaped, the planet’s defenses had been disabled by as-yet-unknown intruders, and rebel scum are currently launching an assault on their base. He clenches his fist tightly over and over again, the pain of the repeated gesture calming him down and focusing his thoughts.

He pays no mind to the squadron of backup troopers waiting for him at the main entrance of the hexagon, even as they snap to attention in response to his arrival. He continues to stride forward, and uses the Force to activate the main portal and enter the complex. With a gesture, the troopers follow him inside.

All around them, instrumentation and components hum smoothly, the noise echoing in the great expanse of open space. All of the sophisticated machinery is to ensure that the ever-expanding mass of dark energy currently accumulating at the center of the planet is held safely in stasis until the time is right for it to be released.

This room is both their greatest asset as well as their greatest vulnerability. Any competent attacker would strike _here_.

Halting, Kylo scans his surroundings, taking the time to breathe in the air and reach out with the Force. He senses two other life forms apart from his own forces.

He motions towards the upper levels. “They’re here. Find them. Up there.”

The squadron immediately springs into action, moving rapidly in the direction he had indicated. Once they’re out of sight, Kylo heads downward.

* * *

From his hiding spot within a narrow chamber set into a wall, Han watches as the caped figure circles the column that he had been hiding behind seconds before. Though the figure is entirely concealed beneath armor and a helmet, there is no mistaking who it is.

 _Ben_.

The sound of his son’s boots— what had alerted him moments earlier— recede into the distance. And rising from his hiding place, Han glances between his son and the way he had come. If he were to leave now, and manage to control his thoughts and emotions while retracing his steps, there was a chance he could make it out of the building without attracting attention. And outside, if everything had gone according to plan, Rey and Finn would be waiting with transportation.

A chance, albeit a slim one, to make it back to the Falcon before everything on this planet goes to hell. They’d be able to blow up the oscillator and save they day, and he could reunite with Leia, and they could start to make up for all the time he had lost.

But the thought of her brings to mind the promise he had made to her. 

_She presses him closer for another long moment before pulling back and taking his hands into her own. “If you see our son,” she whispers, voice hoarse with everything she isn’t saying, “bring him home for me?”_

Swearing under his breath, Han makes up his mind. Instead of retreating, he advances to the edge of the walkway.

“Ben!” The call echoes across the gap and reverberates through the open space below them.

On the far side, a tall figure turns and retraces his last few steps.

“Han Solo.” The modulated voice catches Han off guard. “I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time.”

“Take off the mask,” Han says, and it comes out as more of a command than he intends. He tries to soften it. “You don’t need it. Not here, not with me.”

“What do you think you’ll see if I take it off?”

Han boldly takes another step forward, his tone assured, “The face of my son.”

Reaching up, Ben slowly removes the mask. “Your son is _gone_. He was weak and foolish, like his father.” He sneers, his voice full of pity and anger. “So I destroyed him, and from his ashes I grew _strong_.”

But for the first time, Han sees the face of his son as a grown man, and it jolts him. It was his jaw, but he has Leia’s eyes, Leia’s passion.

Both men are so preoccupied with one another than neither notice when Finn and Rey approach on the railing overhead, having slipped inside to search for Han and Chewie when they had taken longer than expected. Rey’s heart jumps into her throat when she sees the two men standing so close, Kylo’s face twisted in vicious resentment. She listens closely.

“That’s what Snoke wants you believe,” Han is saying. He isn’t pleading, isn’t begging— just stating a fact. “My son is still alive. I’m looking at him right now.”

Kylo takes a step forward, his eyes blazing with fury. “No! The Supreme Leader is wise. He knows me for who I am, who I can become. He’s shown me my true potential. And he knows you for what _you_ really are, Han Solo. Not a general, not a hero. You’re just a small-time thief.”

The insult doesn’t land as expected because Han just flashes a whisper of a grin. “Well, he’s got that part right.”

Drawn by the sounds of disagreement and Ren’s booming voice, Rey watches as another group of spectators arrive to watch the encounter: a squad of stormtroopers. Undoubtedly fearful of taking an initiative that might be frowned upon, they hang back and await a command.

Han moves even further toward his son, no hesitation in his stride or in his voice. “Can’t you see that they’re using you? Manipulating you for your abilities, for your power? When Snoke gets everything he wants from you, he’ll crush you, he’ll toss you aside. And if you have half the perception that I know you do, you know that I’m telling you the truth.”

Kylo’s jaw tics, and he gnaws on his cheek and doesn’t respond. His anger has faded away, replaced by hesitation and wariness.

“It’s too late,” He says finally, “I can’t turn back now.”

“No,” Han says, coming even closer. “It’s not too late. Leave here with me, right now. Come home, Ben. Your mother misses you.”

And Rey watches with awe as tears fall down Kylo’s face.

Kylo’s breath comes out shuddering, his jaw working with indecision. “I’m being torn apart,” he says, voice breaking. “I want, I need to be free of this pain. I know what I have to do, but I— I don’t know if I have the strength to do it.” His eyes are wet with the promise of tears and the beginnings of grief as he focuses on his eyes on his father. “Will you help me?”

“Of course, of  _ course _ ,” Han vows, a firm nod. “Ben, I would do anything for you.”

Shakily, he nods back, taking a step towards his father, lightsaber outstretched as an offering. Han wraps his arms around his son in a warm embrace, but something feels off to Rey, something feels not quite right. 

The tears welling up in her husband’s eyes are genuine, but his face is wracked in grief, his cheeks flushed red. She notices that Han didn’t take the lightsaber, that Kylo still holds it blade side facing out towards his father— oh,  _ no _ .

And she watches as he activates the blade with the horror of someone who knows what is coming but is unable to act. The fiery red beam comes to life and pierces Han’s chest from front to back. Smoke billows from the wound, and the blade is extinguished as quickly as it appeared. 

Han’s knees crumple, but he clasps one hand hard onto Ben’s shoulder and holds himself upright, long enough to stare back into the face of the man that, for all of his sins (even this one), was still his son. Tears are streaking down Ben’s face, his brows furrowed and breathing quick. 

The grip on his son’s shoulder isn’t enough to keep him upright anymore, even as he feels his heartbeat slowing. He crumples, falling to his knees, and Ben follows, adam's apple bobbing as he tries and fails to swallow his grief. 

A rush of memories flash through Han’s mind: the wars he had fought, the friends he had made, every single argument he ever had with Leia that made him fall more in love with her, their wedding, the day he found out he was going to be a  _ father _ . Words he wished he had spoken filled his thoughts, and all the others he regretted having said. All of those chances, all of his time to make things right, it was all gone now. Lost in an instant.

But as he looks up at his son, Han realizes that maybe he has once chance left, after all. 

His left hand is pressed to his wound but Han reaches up with his right and cups his hand around Ben’s jaw, his thumb wiping away the tears. “Hey, hey, listen to me, son, it’s alright,” he coughs and tastes coppery blood in his mouth, and clears his throat before continuing. Death can  _ wait _ .

“I forgive you. It’s okay, you’ll— you’ll always be our son, you hear me? Nothing you could ever do will erase that, and it’ll never—” He coughs again, harder this time, and his voice cracks as he says his last words. 

“It’ll never be too late to come back home.”

Stunned, Kylo Ren watches as the light fades from Han Solo’s eyes. His hands are wet with the still-warm blood, and a dull screaming echoes in his ears. Where was the outrage? The anger? Why hadn’t he called him a monster?

And why doesn’t he feel better? Following through on the act ought to make him stronger. Instead, he finds himself weaker than ever before. He feels _empty_. The pattern isn't lost on him.

While Kylo doesn’t hear the roar of the enraged Wookie above, he  _ does _ feel the sting of the shot from the bowcaster as it slams into his side, knocking him on his back. The stormtroopers behind him begin returning fire, immediately blasting back at the source, but he watches as Uncle Chewie retreats down a corridor, hitting the switch on the remote detonator as he runs. 

The first charge ignites, then two, then four, then all the rest in a cascading explosion that rocks the interior of the hexagon. Walkways begin to collapse, plunging to the bottom of the seemingly bottomless cavern. The walls tremble and fall as their main supports and subsidiary columns snap, and his entire world turns to fire and chaos. 

He struggles to stand, then, he looks up. He sees Rey, drawn to her, as he always is, and the shock of recognition is enough to help him regain his footing. He puts one foot after another and presses on, moving towards her with determination. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorrrryyyyy
> 
> thanks as always to my beta, who makes the chapters truly shine!


	14. This Doesn't Change Anything

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Rey witnesses her husband, Kylo Ren, kill his father, she and Finn attempt to find the Falcon and flee the planet. Rey's husband has other ideas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter kicked my ASS y'all, I'm so sorry to have been gone for so long! I wrote maybe five different versions of this chapter and I hated this one the least. 
> 
> I've recently been thinking about where I want to take this story and the merits of potentially rewriting it to change the beginning a bit. I've tentatively decided against rewriting, for now, but that's an option very much still on the table in the future.

Finn and Rey trudge through the heavy snow in the increasingly dark forest, fruitlessly looking for a recognizable path. The artificial darkness has turned the forest foreboding, the remaining light casting deep shadows onto the snow. Rey can _feel_ that they’re being followed, and so when Finn stops to heave in breaths, she turns to him.

“We need to keep going,” she insists, running back to him through the holes her path has already made in the snow.

“What are we even running towards?” Finn pants, his breath coming out in puffs of steam.

“It’s not what we’re running towards,” she says, “it’s who we’re running _from_.”

Finn’s face blanches, and she watches him muster the will to keep moving. They press onward, and she tries to lead them in the direction that Finn’s communicator had displayed the last location of the _Millenium Falcon_ as before it went dead. Rey refuses to think about what’ll happen to them if they don’t find the ship in time, if they’re too late, if they’re stuck on the surface even as the planet disintegrates beneath their feet.

She can feel her lips getting chapped and frosty, her cheeks are numb from the frozen tears on her face, and her nose runs from the cold. She wipes it off with the bottom of her sleeve and turns back to make sure Finn is still behind her, but then she sees _him_.

A dark figure advances towards them, some fifteen meters away. His shape is unmistakeable. Finn must see the ashen look on her face because he turns around and draws his blaster in one smooth motion.

Finn steps forward, takes aim, and pulls the trigger of his blaster with the type of speed that could only be achieved through a lifetime of training. Rey watches the bolt accelerate almost faster than her eye can see— shooting toward Kylo Ren— only to freeze mid-air, a handful of paces from its intended target.

Then she sees Finn’s arms go limp, a strangled sound escaping his throat. She watches in panic as he helplessly strains against the newfound Force hold, hands clutching at his throat, legs kicking up the top layer of snow.

“ _Let him go_ ,” she hisses, the sound immediately drawing Kylo’s attention, immediately turning his head in her direction, but he doesn’t lower his hand. Finn’s face is growing increasingly purple, his kicks slowing.

Rey stalks up to him, keeping his eye solely on her. “It’s not him you want.”

Rey had perfected the art of the stand-off from her time on Jakku. When she had first staked claim on that old AT-AT, a gang of Teedos and half-starved scavengers had woken her in the middle of the night, attacked her new home, hoping to sell _her_ for her respective parts. She beat them off, but a few of the braver ones returned a few nights later.

She was expecting them, had been for the last several nights. They found her sitting on the top of the AT-AT, her legs dangling over the open hatch, sharpening her makeshift knives.

They had stared at her. She stared back.

After a long moment where neither looks away, Kylo flings his arm sideways in a single gesture, and Finn goes flying, smashing into a nearby tree. Rey winces as his limp body slides down the bark and to the ground, unconscious.

She almost runs to her friend, almost yells his name, but looking at the intensity on Kylo’s face and the frozen tears on his cheeks she knows that would be the wrong move. Kylo Ren is a man on the verge of losing control, his entire body pulled taut like a string.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the glimmer of another weapon, tucked into Finn’s belt.

Kylo has taken several steps toward her now, and they circle each other in the snow, neither looking away. Snow begins to fall all around them, the harsh wind threatening to turn it into a blizzard.

Kylo is the one to break the silence. “You won’t understand this, but he _had_ to die, there was no other way, no other option—”

Fresh tears cloud her vision and run down her cheeks. “He _gave_ you an option— he offered you forgiveness,” her voice is hoarse and her throat scratchy from emotion and the bitter cold, “and you _killed_ him.”

Rey hadn’t given the reveal of her husband’s background much consideration before now, but knowing that he had a family that loved him, that was willing to forgive him for his sins even on their deathbed, that he had everything she’s ever wanted and he’s willing to throw it all away— it makes her sick that he would so easily squander such a gift. She had spent _years_ thinking (hoping, really) that it must’ve been a mistake, that she couldn’t _really_ be Sheev Palpatine’s granddaughter, that somewhere out there was a family that was missing her, that loved her, that her real parents were still out there somewhere, that they couldn’t _really_ be dead—

_Maker, what she wouldn’t give for a family that loves her._

“I—” his face cycles through a number of emotions, warring with itself. “I didn’t have a choice.”

She bares her teeth and hisses, her heart entirely devoid of sympathy for him, “there is _always_ a choice, but you were just too much of a coward,” she spits,“to make the right one.”

She raises her hand and calls to the weapon on Finn’s belt with the Force, and only when it rushes toward her through the air does she see what it is for the first time: A _lightsaber_. A shining silver handle, practical and utilitarian in design, clearly a Jedi weapon.

 _Where could Finn have found one of these?_ She thinks, briefly, of Maz Kanata, of that thousand-year old castle that had surely seen the Jedi order rise and fall, that must’ve contained so many secrets.

The weapon leaps into her hand like it had wanted to be there, like it preferred her to the alternative. She marvels at how well it feels in her palm and thumbs the beam to life. With a low hum, the electric blue blade springs to life. Something in her _sings_ with recognition, like she’s finally where she needs to be, like she’s finally on the right path.

“That weapon,” Kylo whispers, staring at the lightsaber in her hand as if he’s seeing a ghost, “belongs to _me_.”

“Yours?” she asks, twirling the weapon in her hand to get a better feel of the handle, the blade humming as it makes a wide arc. The sheer _rightness_ of the way the hilt feels in her grip almost makes her stumble, it feels like she was made for this. “ _It_ doesn’t seem to think so.”

“Give it to me,” he growls, and she’s never seen him like this before, almost unhinged with the wild look in his eyes, not bothering to hide the wanton hunger on his face. He eyes the lightsaber like it’s some precious thing, something priceless.

“No,” she says, “I don’t think I will.”

The snow around them begins to fall in earnest and the unrelenting wind makes the chill all the more biting. Beneath their feet, the ground rumbles, another reminder that the planet is falling apart from the inside. Rey’s heart begins to beat a little bit faster, now. _They don’t have much time left_.

Kylo activates his own lightsaber, and his face is illuminated from the gleaming red light of the weapon. It casts stark shadows on his face, and with his intense expression and the dark hair falling in front of his face he looks like death itself, come to claim her. He draws himself up and into a fighting position, a towering figure in the snow.

“I’ve never lost a battle,” he warns.

Rey raises her chin, adopting a fighting stance. “You’ll lose this one.”

He meets her blade with his own, and the resulting burst of energy lights their entire section of the forest, red meeting blue to create shocks of purple. The snow falling around them hisses into steam upon contact with their lightsabers, and a hazy cloud begins to surround them.

Her skill with the weapon is raw at best, and immediately she wishes it was as long as her quarterstaff, with two blades on either side. She fights the only way she knows how, ferociously and with everything she has. Every time she’s ever fought, it’s always been for her life.

And now that this lightsaber is in her hand and she can feel its power, can feel how it connects to her own Force signature, how they weave together, how _right_ it feels, all she can think of is what Kylo has stolen from her. Her freedom, her life, _Han_ — her friend.

The tears start falling down her face again and her attacks grow relentless, drive by a fury as new to his experience as unexpected. The lightsaber begins to feel like an extension of herself, of her will. It’s so easy to call on this seemingly bottomless well of fury and pain inside of her, so easy to let it fuel her. Her once hasty and unsure movements speed up into a blur. All at once, Kylo is forced to go on the defensive, unable to surrender and unwilling to unleash himself upon her with the intent to kill.

For a while, she drives him backward, launching one attack after another, constantly pressing forward, never surrendering an inch of ground that she manages to gain. She wants to hurt him, wants to make him _pay_ _for what he’s done_.

Then the fight begins to shift again, shifting in his favor like a rising tide. Either Kylo changes his mind about keeping her alive or he regains his self assurance, but either way, his moves grow more focused, more calculated. Slowly, he regains the advantage, forcing Rey on the defensive. It is her turn to parry strike after strike, but then she gets her blade at _just_ the right angle, enough to give her the leverage to kick him in the center of his chest, pushing him back and giving her room to advance.

Even though he rears back at her kick, he’s back to his previous position in an instant.

Rey moves to strike again, but then she feels the world shake beneath her feet, harder than it ever has before. A vast rumbling echoes all around them, and an enormous chunk of forest behind her collapses downward as if nothing had been holding it in place at all. The earth beneath the balls of her feet crumbles away in an instant.

She tumbles back, arms flailing, thumbing the blade off frantically so she doesn’t slice herself in half. It takes all of her willpower to maintain her hold on the handle, to not let it fly out of her grip and into the expanding fiery core of the planet.

And she’s falling, falling, _falling_ , her heart in her throat, her hand reaching up—

Then she’s caught, pulled into an armored chest, held in an ironclad grip. Both of them are breathing hard, but she can hear his heartbeat from here. It’s beating faster than her own, even. His warm hands dig into her waist, flexing as if to make sure she’s really there. His chest shakes on every exhale.

The seemingly insurmountable and bottomless fury she had felt for him only seconds ago is duller, now. She had almost been ready to kill him, she had _wanted_ to, and he had _saved her life_.

“This—” She says, thoroughly unsettled as she pulls herself out of his arms, not allowing herself to dwell on the fact that she immediately misses his hold on her, and holsters the lightsaber on her belt. She walks backwards, away from him and the cliff and the fiery doom he had just saved her from. “This doesn’t change anything.”

His fingers flex for a moment down at his sides, and briefly he looks like he wants to fight her again. Eventually he sighs, resigned and exhausted, before holstering his weapon. “I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you think! Your comments really do encourage me to keep writing this.


	15. With This Blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Previously, on A Duel of Destinies: Kylo finds Finn and Rey in the forest. Finn is knocked out by Kylo and our two lovebirds have a lightsaber duel, promptly ended by Kylo saving her life when the earth crumbles under her feet. He let's her escape, because, y'know, near death experiences are a total mood killer. 
> 
> Shorter chapter today! But I hope you enjoy it all the same! This arc should be wrapped up soon (I know, I know, I've said that for like the past four chapters, but it's true! I promise)

Rey’s thankful that Finn is still unconscious when Chewie finds them and takes them aboard the _Millennium Falcon_. He’ll have questions, namely how she managed to fight Kylo Ren and escape— all without a scratch on her, which she doesn’t have a good answer for. They drop Finn in the medbay, barely taking the time to strap him in before heading to the cockpit. There’s no time to waste, and despite it’s modifications, the ship still flies better with someone in the copilot’s seat.

Her heart doesn’t stop hammering in her chest until they’re well beyond the atmosphere of the planet, just safe enough away to watch the Starkiller Base system become a binary, the unstable planetary core imploding into a star. 

She swears she sees another shuttle leave the planet just in time, a black First-Order Epsilon-class shuttle. Something inside of her _knows_. The relief that floods through her knowing that he’s safe is immediately followed with

Chewie punches in the coordinates to their destination, the Resistance base on D’Qar, with careful and controlled movements. The Wookie holds himself stiffly, and the posture of someone barely holding themselves together is achingly familiar to Rey. Once they make the jump to lightspeed, she reaches over the console and places her hand over his. It’s a small gesture of comfort, the least she can do, and the Wookie’s broad shoulders tremble, tears soaking into the fur around his eyes.

 _I will miss him,_ he says in Shyriiwook.

* * *

At least two hundred cheering people surround the _Falcon_ when Rey emerges from the darkness of the ship and onto the boarding ramp. Chewbacca moves faster than she does, carrying Finn in his arms and heading toward the medical personnel.

The humid jungle air, so different from the Jakku heat she had wrapped herself head to toe for, immediately makes the gauzy wraps feel sticky on her skin. Her head is pounding and Rey is exhausted, the last time she slept she had been strapped to that rack. She knows she should be celebrating, that their mission, despite its losses, saved billions of lives, but she just wants to sleep.

War is _exhausting_.

A short, elegant and important-looking older woman stands at the front of the crowd, flanked by BB-8 on one side and a gleaming golden protocol droid on the other. It’s the nose and those dark, intense eyes that give it all away— she’s his mother.

Compelled, Rey walks over to her. She had heard enough reports of the Resistance to put the pieces together. And once she’s close enough, General Leia Organa pulls Rey into a warm hug without hesitation.

“You and I have much to discuss,” Leia whispers in her ear before they pull apart. Rey’s shoulders tighten and her gut clenches. _Does she know?_ But, thankfully, the woman continues. “After you get some rest, that is.”

Rey closes her eyes and breathes out a long sigh of relief through her nose. _Thank the Maker_.

The two of them head inside the base, built into the side of the rolling jungle hills. It’s a deep space cache from the old days, Leia explains, built by the Alliance to Restore the Republic. After the civil war had ended, the base had been abandoned, deemed unnecessary.

Moss has grown along some of the walls and Rey spots birds nests in the rafters as the older woman guides her down the long hallways and into the residential sections of the base. Finally, they stop in front of a door.

“It’s not much,” Leia admits, “but there’s a fresh change of sheets and a pillow on the bed.”

Rey nods quietly. “Thank you,” she mutters. She doesn’t know what else to say.

The older woman gives her a sad smile and places a hand on her shoulder, giving it a comforting squeeze. “Come find me, when you wake up.”

* * *

She dreams of the crowd. At first they are the members of the Resistance that had surrounded the Falcon, but the dream shifts, and they become thousands of chanting acolytes in their dark robes and red eyes standing in that enormous chamber, chanting for her blood.

_Su sis kraujas, nexuses dar tave laisvas sekleti seriva j’us._

She is dressed in white— the first time she’s ever worn the color. Her wedding dress is finely crafted, the tight-fitting bodice with a sweetheart neckline made from spidersilk and gossamer, cut low to show the top swells of her breasts. Her neck is bare, her hair down in perfectly-crafted waves.

Rey is made to look innocent and, above all else, _pretty_. A lamb for slaughter.

Fitting, because as she cranes her neck up to look at her husband, he seems entirely ready to devour her and it sends a wave of fear, and even worse, _anticipation_ down her spine. His dark eyes have the same heat they had when they first met, when he bent his head down to kiss her hand.

And because this is a dream, the ceremonial knife appears in her hand without anyone having handed it to her. It’s a relic from when the Sith species had been _real_ , when they had lived on this planet and fashioned those enormous statues in their image. The obsidian blade is small but heavy, enhanced by alchemical alterations that give it an affinity for the dark side of the Force. It glows in her grip, activated by the chanting of the acolytes and the dark energy in the room.

“With this blood,” she says, as she pricks her thumb with the blade. “I do bind thee to me, and forever shall we wade together through our enemies.” Rey swallows and reaches up to smear the blood onto Kylo’s lips, his eyes flashing. She doesn’t dare let herself think too long about how soft they are, how they so eagerly part at her touch.

“T-Together we are one heart, one flesh, one soul, now and forever. With this blood, I vow to never deceive or betray you, for we shall be partners in all things.” _A lie, a lie, a lie._ She continues, “My life is yours to guard and to take, as yours is mine, and no hand but our own shall rend us from this existence. I shall be a shield for your back, and you for mine. With this blood, not even the void shall separate us.”

She hands him the knife, and watches as he repeats the vows and pricks his own finger, almost gasps as he spreads his blood over her lips.

“With this blood,” he says, hand already wrapping itself around her waist and pulling her closer, his head bending down in preparation to seal the deal, “not even the void shall separate us.”

* * *

Kylo Ren is staring at her when she wakes up. Sitting on the small fold-out chair at the foot of the bed that’s far too small for him, his elbows on his knees. He’s in full armor but wears no helmet. His face is bruised and swollen, the skin around his eyes a mottled dark red. She hadn’t done that to him, he had been fine when she left him on the surface of the planet—

Rey opens her mouth to ask the question hanging in the air between the two of them, but he’s gone in an instant. He’s shuttered his end of the bond, closed himself off entirely.

* * *

Rey finds Leia in a conference room set away from the main activity of the base in what looks to be the middle of an important meeting, and almost turns on her heels to wait outside, but Leia catches her eye and gestures for her to join them. She does, slipping into the room and settling into a dark corner near some boxes of old equipment.

A dark-haired pilot is speaking, and the first thought that Rey has when she sees him is that he’s _handsome_. “Kylo Ren said that the segment held by Beebee Ate is the last piece of the map that shows the way to Skywalker’s location. So, where’s the rest of it?”

_“This is accurate,” Han says finally, “but not complete. It’s just a piece. I can tell from the location of the breaks and from what’s only partially shown. We’ll need the rest of the map if we’re ever going to find Luke.”_

_“Rey,” Kylo says, and does he sound more breathless than he had before, or is she imagining it? His eyes dart down to glance at her lips. He opens his mouth to say something but closes it, seems to change course at the last possible moment. His expression tightens with determination.“I want— I_ need _the map to Skywalker.”_

“The First Order has it,” Rey says, looking over to the pilot, reading the tag on his jumpsuit. _Dameron, Poe_. Somewhere in the back of her mind, a bell rings. Hasn’t she heard that name before? “They extracted it from the Imperial archives.”

“It makes sense,” One of the Resistance Admirals nods. “The Empire would have been looking for the first Jedi temples. In destroying all of the Jedi sanctuaries they would have acquired a great deal of peripheral information.”

“This war won’t end until either the First Order or the Resistance is destroyed,” Leia points out. “We lost a lot of good people on Starkiller base and only came out with a victory by the skin of our teeth. The best way to honor their deaths is to _win_ , and we won’t stand a chance without Luke.”

The ensuing quiet is absolute for several moments and abruptly interrupted by an R-2 series astromech droid rolling into the center of the assembly with a flurry of beeping and whistling.

A golden protocol droid is hot on his heels. “Artoo! I haven’t seen you this functional since—“ He’s interrupted by a fresh barrage of binary, completely drowning him out. “Slow down! You’re giving me data overload!”

An excited Leia moves closer, crouching in front of the smaller droid. “What’s he saying?”

The protocol droid explains. “Artoo has a significant amount of data from the Imperial archives catalogued. If the information you’re seeking is in there, he believes he might have it. He’s scanning through the catalogued data now.”

Rey’s come closer to the center of the room, interested in all the commotion. “You’re saying he has _the rest of the map_?”

“He’s certainly implying the possibility!” The protocol droid says. “I’ve _never_ heard him beep with this much energy before.”

Finally, emitting a long whistle, R2-D2 projects a three-dimensional image of an enormous navigational star chart, missing a substantial fragment.

BB-8, on the floor near Poe’s feet, begins beeping excitedly.

“Yeah buddy, hold on,” Poe tells him, “I have it.” He kneels down to the side of the droid and removes a tiny data device from a sealed compartment in his clothing, originally given to him by Lor San Tekka. He inserts it into BB-8 and steps back.

A lens on the droid’s side comes to life, and after a moment of shrinking down its proportions to match R2-D2’s map, the two portions merge perfectly to form a completed chart.

Leia sways, her entire face breaking out into an astonished smile. “Luke…”

“The map,” Rey breathes, staring in wonder as her eyes wander over the depiction of a substantial portion of the galaxy. “It’s the whole map!”

Cheers and spontaneous embraces and congratulations fill the room with joy. It overtakes her, and she hugs the person closest to her without any thought. The sudden, tight embrace quickly leads to a moment of mutual awkwardness when they pull back.

“Uh, hi,” the Pilot mumbles, BB-8 whirring excitedly at his feet. “I’m Poe.” He sticks out his hand for her to shake.

Rey takes it, shaking his hand with a smile. “The X-Wing Pilot that Finn escaped with, right? I’m Rey.”

He smiles back, a little more at ease. “So _you’re_ Rey! He’s been looking all over for you ever since he woke up, you know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> soooooo what do you think happened to Kylo?
> 
> While you wait for the next chapter to come out, I can't recommend diasterism's work enough! I recently read her Sword of the Jedi series and I have SO many emotions. I'll put a link below so you can check it out!
> 
> https://www.archiveofourown.org/series/497407


	16. Ahch-To

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously, on A Duel of Destinies: Rey, Finn, Chewie arrive at the Resistance base in D'Qar and the pieces are finally put together! The map to Luke Skywalker is in the hands of the Resistance and hope is in the air.

“So you’re telling me that you fought Kylo Ren and _won_?” Finn asks, incredulous. Poe leans on one of the temporary walls surrounding Finn’s med-bay room, openly impressed.

When she had first entered the room with Poe, Dr. Kalonia told her that Finn had been diagnosed with a pretty serious concussion from hitting the tree with such force, and would be kept under observation for another few days. Apart from a few more scrapes and bruises, he was _fine_.

Rey shifts her weight from one foot to the other, her eyes anywhere but on her friend. “It was really more of a draw,” she says sheepishly. “And he was holding himself back, anyway, I’m sure if—”

“ _Holding himself back?_ ” Finn asks, eyes narrowing. “Why?”

She knows that she _should_ come clean now, tell him and everyone else the truth, but they’d look at her differently. She was born and raised in the dark side of the Force, they’d be wise not to trust her if they knew. It would be prudent to distance themselves, to not accept her help, her friendship.

She swallows, not ready to give up this _one good thing_ she’s managed to make for herself, and lies by omission. “Kylo Ren told me that I’m strong in the Force, and back on Takodana he offered to be my teacher. I think— I think he was holding back because he wants me to join him.”

The guilt of her deception begins to eat at her almost immediately.

Poe lets out a long whistle. “You really are just full of surprises, aren’t you?” He says, just as Finn gapes at her.

“ _The Force?_ ”

“When he was in my head, in that interrogation room, I was able to turn it around,” she confides, her voice a whisper. “I was able to see inside _his_ mind, read _his_ thoughts.”

“You were able to read his thoughts?” Poe asks, jumping into the conversation again, his eyes alight with interest. “Then maybe you’ll be able to settle this bet that’s been going around base, now, I gotta lot of credits riding on this— Is Kylo Ren a virgin?”

Both Rey and Finn turn to Poe, incredulous.

He’s quick to defend himself. “It’s a valid question!” He insists. “I mean, come on Finn, you’re telling me you’ve _never_ thought about it? He’s an overgrown man-child with a bucket on his head and a big red glow-stick that’s _definitely_ compensating for something, there’s no way he’s not a virgin, right? He _screams_ sexually repressed.” He turns to Rey, hopeful. “So?”

Rey splutters, her cheeks absolutely aflame. “Uh—“

Finn saves her, shaking his head. “Not that your reasoning isn’t sound, but I heard rumors before I defected that Kylo Ren got married like a year and a half ago but his wife went missing or escaped or something— there were never any details. The other Knights would get sent out on missions and I heard they were being sent out to track her down and bring her back. And obviously no _official_ confirmation of anything…” He trails off, before starting up again in a conspiratorial whisper.“It was _completely_ forbidden to talk about it. I never learned her name but I heard a ‘trooper got sent for reconditioning just for _thinking_ about her in his presence.”

“ _But_ ,” Poe points out. “That still doesn’t answer the question. Who knows? She might’ve escaped before, _you know_ , they—“

Leia chooses that moment to enter Finn’s cramped med-bay room, forcing Poe to abruptly end a particularly vulgar pantomime. “Rey,” she says, giving the pilot a sharp look. “Could we talk for a moment?” 

* * *

Leia takes her outside of the base and into the jungle. The canopy is wide, casting much of the ground in shadow and dappled light. They walk along a well-used trail, broad ferns and colorful foliage all around them.

“It’s not in line with the old Jedi Order’s ways, they saw too much risk in training older children, let alone adults,” Leia says, discussing Rey’s newly discovered Force abilities. “But it could be possible for you, Rey. You could have a teacher in Luke, if you wanted. We could really use someone like you.”

Rey’s quiet for a moment, taking the time to think things through. She desperately wants to get away from all of this, but she had made a difference in this war, had helped safely deliver the map to Luke Skywalker to the Resistance, she had helped destroy Starkiller base. She could _help_. Maybe she had been wrong, back in Maz’s Cantina, maybe the future isn’t as bleak, isn’t as predetermined as she had thought.

_Maybe they really do stand a chance._

And would it be bad to train herself in the Force? Maybe if she had a Jedi teacher, if she was versed in the Light, she wouldn’t feel this _darkness_ pulling at her—

“I’m biased, I’ll admit,” Leia continues, jumping in response to Rey’s prolonged silence. “We need all the fighters we can get, and _two_ Jedi is far better than one, and, granted, the life expectancy for a Jedi has plummeted considerably—“

“I’ll do it,” Rey says. “I’ll train with Luke, if he’ll have me.”

A small smile curls the other woman’s lips. “Good.”

 _Tell her, tell her, tell her, tell her—_ “But I haven’t been completely honest with you,” Rey blurts out.

She tells Leia everything. The guilt of practically lying to Finn and Poe had really started to eat at her, to churn her gut. She has to come clean to _someone_ , and if anyone deserves to be told first, it’s Kylo’s mother. She tells Leia about Exegol, about Palpatine, about her arranged marriage to Kylo, her escape, how the Force bond between them had awoken on Jakku, and everything that had led up to now.

Something in Leia’s expression tightens when Rey talks about Han and Kylo, and she realizes that Leia has essentially lost both her son _and_ her husband, and has likely had little time to grieve the loss of either of them.

Neither of them say anything for a long while after Rey’s done.

“We named him Ben,” Leia says finally, breaking the silence. “Ever since he was a child, he had nightmares, claimed he sometimes heard voices in his head. Hearing voices isn’t in and of itself unusual when you’re Force sensitive, but one of the voices in Ben’s head would tell him to do things, _awful_ things. Luke had started a training academy, to create the next generation of Jedi, so we sent him there, and I thought that training would help, that he might learn to block out that voice…”

Leia pauses, and Rey can feel her guilt, her regret flowing out of her through the Force. _He must get it from her_.

“And Han and I,” she continues, “we were so busy, so wrapped up in galactic politics and our own problems that we hardly ever visited. It’s my greatest regret, not making more time for him. I always thought there would be a _later_ , but there never was. The voice inside Ben, it _spread to the other students_. By the time Luke had figured it all out, it was too late.”

Rey both really, _really_ wants to know what happened next and really, _really_ doesn’t. She can guess it wasn’t pretty.

“I’ve met plenty of darksiders,” Rey says, “and on Starkiller base, after he—“ _after he murdered his father,_ she doesn’t say, “he looked so conflicted, like there was a war waging inside him. There’s still light in him, even if he wishes otherwise.”

Leia hums, nodding slowly. “If this Force bond between the two of you is strong enough that it can bridge such long distances, it’s possible that your Light, or even absence of strong Dark energy, could be ‘infecting’ him, as it were. Countering Snoke and Palpatine’s influence.”

Leia stops along the trail, pivots in front of Rey to take her hands into her own. “I couldn’t ask for a better daughter-in-law if I tried, but Rey, you were married to him against your will, and the last thing I’d want is for you to feel _obligated_ to him, in any way—”

“I know what you’re trying to say,” Rey says gratefully, “but your son might’ve never fallen to the dark side if it hadn’t been for my grandfather. So as much as I wish I wasn’t part of this fight, as much as I long to distance myself from it, it’s my responsibility too. I want there to be at least one Palpatine in history that did something _good_.”

“I’ll go to Luke,” Rey vows, “and I’ll try my best to save your son.”

* * *

Only a few short hours later, Rey finds herself in the Millennium Falcon again, the map to Luke Skywalker programmed into the ship’s computer.

“You’re _sure_ you have to go?” Finn asks, standing at the foot of the Millennium Falcon’s loading ramp.

Chewie is nearby, performing checks of the ship’s external systems with meticulous attention to detail even though she told him he could stay, that she could take another ship. The Wookie had insisted on joining her. _It will be good to see him_ , he had said gruffly. _I’m going._ She hadn’t argued further.

Rey nods, “I need to learn how to control this thing inside me and Skywalker is one of the only people in the galaxy that can teach me.” She shifts her feet a bit, nervous but wanting to say what comes next. “Do you remember what you said, back in Maz’s cantina? You called me a _hero_ , said I could make a difference. That’s— that’s really the first time I can ever remember someone believing in me like that. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, _thank_ —“

He interrupts her by pulling her into a big hug, and her words are muffled as her mouth crashes into his— or wait, _Poe’s_ — leather jacket. She relaxes into it though, hugs him back tight, enveloped in that warm feeling of friendship.

He pulls back, claps a hand on her shoulder and beams at her warmly. “Someday, you know,” he says, “You’re gonna have to tell me about this tragic origin story of yours. It’s only fair.”

She sighs in relief, smiling back at him and nodding. “When we see each other again.”

After a few more minutes of goodbyes, Leia takes Finn’s place, taking Rey’s hands into her own again like she had done in the jungle.

“May the Force be with you,” she says.

In the cockpit, she finds Chewie already sitting in the copilot’s seat.

“You’re sure?” Rey asks.

He nods, and she says nothing more about it.

Rey takes a deep breath and settles into the pilot’s seat. Han’s seat. If Chewie feels like she can do this, then who is she to argue?

As if sensing her anxiety, the Wookie reaches over to muss her hair, and she grins, making a show of slapping his hand away. The familial gesture makes her heart soar, fills her with joy, almost makes tears spring to her eyes. _Stars_ , she had wanted something like what she’s found with the Resistance, with Chewie and Finn and Leia, for so long.

_I won't let them down._

* * *

Rey has never, in her life, seen so much water. Ahch-to is mostly ocean, speckled with towering islands of black rock ascending into the sky in sharp, jagged peaks. The throats of volcanoes whose slopes had long since eroded away, the ship’s computer informs them. And where the volcanic rock has given way to soil, greenery covers the surface. Mostly thick groundcover like Blueleaf shrubs Phelarion moss, creating patches of brilliant emerald amidst a dark azure sea.

Big, flying creatures with wide, translucent wings like Gorsian dragonflies soar between the islands, their wings shimmering with color when they catch sunlight.

She’s looking around so much that she almost misses the island in question, banking hard toward one of the other islands while decelerating.

A wide, flat area at the base of the island’s central mountain becomes their landing site, providing just enough room for them to touch down while avoiding the ruins and the water.

When they’re landed, Rey sits still for a long moment in the pilot’s seat. She’s trying to come to terms with where she is, what she’s doing, who she’s about to meet. She steels herself, chanting her mantra in her head over and over. _I can do this, I can do this._

She descends the boarding ramp, her staff strapped to her back, Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber at her hip.

 _These_ , something whispers to her through the Force, sounding like dozens of voices all at once, _are your first steps._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sooo where do you stand on the Resistance base's bet? 
> 
> (unrelated-- I've gotten some questions on why Finn wasn't able to figure Rey out back on Starkiller base but Han was, and I hope this maybe clears things up a bit? I imagine that a lot more 'troopers found about this mysterious wife after Finn defected and Rey resurfaced, but that Kylo's whole situation isn't exactly open knowledge to the FO or the general galactic public. Han and Leia had likely received Resistance intel about some kind of marriage, because I modeled them as more in-the-know about Kylo Ren hot gossip than the average sanitation stormtrooper, if that makes sense? It's maybe a bit of a plot hole, but whatever, if I rewrite this I'll fix it)


	17. Golden Dice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously, on a duel of destinies: Rey confesses to Leia her relationship to Kylo and relation to Palpatine, and is sent to Ahch-To with R2D2 and Chewie to convince Luke Skywalker to return to the fold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took longer than I expected it to because I've actually started a new fic! Check out "A Haunting of Skywalker House" if you're interested in some demon!kylo/witch!rey content. 
> 
> And with that, let us begin the second storyline arc!

Rey and Chewie hike together up the mountain. The salty spray of the ocean crashing against the rocks is a novel sight and absolutely _beautiful_ , even if it does make her lips chapped and raw.

The two of them had left R2-D2 to watch over the Falcon while they were gone, and even though the ship would require even more repairs to fix its ill-advised modifications and malfunctions, but Chewie had insisted. _It can wait_ , he had said gruffly, before joining her at the base of the winding and most certainly ancient, stone staircase.

At first, Rey’s nervous that they won’t find him here, that they will arrive at the top of the mountain only to find that Luke Skywalker is gone, that he packed his things and left whatever way he came. That he vanished, like a ghost.

But when she reaches out through the Force, she’s relived to find that she can _feel_ him, a dull but present light-side Force energy at the top of the cliffs. It’s a feeling she isn’t used to, a sort of pricking at the edge of her vision, a presence just behind her, like someone is watching her from just out of sight.

Ahch-To is bare but far from sterile, the steep slopes teeming with dense moss and evergreen ground cover. Stick-like insects jump out of their way as they ascend, and they catch glimpses of pudgy little avian-like things with big, dark, _adorable_ eyes that chirp shy greetings in their direction.

Rey vows to befriend them and see for herself if their fur it as soft as it looks after they find Luke.

Soon enough, they see the tops of small stone huts, ancient but well cared for. Wookie grunts that perhaps he is here, perhaps they should investigate what’s behind some of the weathered wood doors, but Rey shakes her head. Not yet, not here. They have farther yet to climb.

They find him at the very top of the rocky cliffs, his back to them, dressed in a simple grey cloak and robes, looking out onto the endless, tumultuous sea.

After a moment, Jedi Master Luke Skywalker turns to them, slowly raising his up the hood of his cloak, revealing a weather-worn and wrinkled face, with a grey beard and piercing blue eyes.

One of his hands is flesh and blood, but the other an old, elegant prosthetic.

Rey doesn’t look away from the man she’d traveled across the galaxy to see. She steps forward, removing the lightsaber from its place at her belt and holding it out to him.

An offer. A plea.

A dozen emotions chase themselves across Luke Skywalker’s face as he looks down at the lightsaber. Yearning, grief, _guilt_ , Rey notices, with no small amount of curiosity.

He takes several tentative steps closer to them, reaches his flesh-and-bone hand out toward the saber—

Only to be swept up and lifted off of his feet into a crushing embrace by Chewie, who’s snarling and roaring various things in Shyrriwook far too fast for Rey to make out all of it.

She catches some things, like _Kriffing son of a bantha, how dare you disappear,_ and _I’m not really sure how I feel about the beard, if I’m honest,_ and _we missed you, Luke._

Suddenly feeling terribly out of place and strangely overcome, Rey has to blink back what she suspects (but certainly wouldn’t admit) might be tears. She sniffs inelegantly and blinks a bit too fast to be normal and stares out into to the ocean, keeping the makeshift family reunion within her peripheral vision.

“Alright, _alright_! I get it, Chewie, put me _down_!” Luke insists, and his attempt at sounding authoritative deteriorates into a rough chuckle as the Wookie sets him back down on solid ground and ruffles his hair affectionately with one of his great big paws.

“That was the _Falcon’s_ deadbeat engine I heard, right?” Luke asks, addressing Chewie but sparing a glance at Rey. The both of them, Rey and Chewie, nod.

“Chewie,” Luke starts, hesitantly, as if he knows he won’t like the answer, “where’s Han?”

* * *

Leia holds a small wooden figurine in her hand, crudely whittled by an inexperienced hand. Han had made it for her the night before the battle of Endor, had meant it to be her, and she’d made his ears turn pink when she’d innocently asked if it was one of their Ewok hosts. He had tossed it aside in embarrassment, but she’d kept it with it her all these years, one of the only things she had left of a man who had spent his life determined to avoid making a footprint.

Another memento, a pair of golden dice, feel heavy in her pocket.

She turns, her heart weighed down by all the grief she doesn’t have room or time to show, to address the Resistance. She’ll make this short. It’s been a long day and she wants to go back to her quarters and fall asleep with one of Han’s old shirts like she always does when she misses him like this. It’s like a punch to the gut when she realizes that the dull yearning and loneliness that she had felt for the majority of their marriage (they were always apart, always traveling, always thinking there would be time later) is a permanent thing now, because she’ll never see him again. She’ll never hold him, never complain about the oil stains on his clothes that would always inevitably transfer onto hers—

She takes a breath. Not now. She doesn’t have time for this now.

The cam droid repositions itself in front of her, and she stares into the lens, her gaze steady. Her words will be carried throughout the galaxy. 

“Han would hate this ceremony,” she says. “He had no patience for speeches or memorials, which was to be expected from a man who was allergic to politics and suspicious of causes.”

Smiles from the crowd gathered in front of her creep onto the faces of those who knew her husband, who had fought alongside him, like Admiral Ackbar and Nien Nunb.

“I one told Han that it was tiresome watching him do the right thing only after he’d exhausted every alternative,” her voice doesn’t waver but she doesn’t try to hide her grief. “But he’d always get there. Han hated bullies, and injustice, and cruelty— and when confronted with them, he’d could never stand down. Not in his youth on Corellia, not above Yavin, not on Endor, and not at Starkiller base.”

In the distance, the evacuation preparations are ongoing. Heavy machinery whirrs as supplies are loaded onto transports. The First Order’s warships would loom above the planet soon, but they would hopefully be gone by then.

“My husband fancied himself a scoundrel,” she says, smiling at that last word. “But he wasn’t. He loved freedom— not just for himself but for everyone in the galaxy. And he was always willing to fight for that freedom. He never wanted to know the odds, because he’d already made up his mind that he’d prevail. And, somehow, even when it seemed impossible, he did.”

“Han didn’t want to know the odds when he and Chewbacca flew back to the Death Star in time to save my brother Luke— and the last hope for our Alliance,” she says. “He didn’t ask abut them when he accepted a general’s rank for the ground assault at Endor. He didn’t want them when he fought for freedom at Kashyyyk. And I know in my heart that he refused to think about them when he flew through the First Order’s shields.”

“I can’t tell you what our odds are now, what our chances are of beating the First Order— and I don’t want to know. We will return to the fight because, like Han, we believe in justice and freedom. We refuse to accept a galaxy ruled by cruelty. We fight for democracy, we fight for love, we fight for all of those in the galaxy who need a champion, who call out to us in terror and grief, who want to be set free of their chains. And we have all lost someone,” she says, and her lip trembles now, and the assembled crowd nods, with tears in their eyes.

“And we will honor their deaths by making sure they did not die in vain. We will honor them by fighting for the ideals they died for, and we will honor them by _winning_ this war.”

The cam droid moves to turn off, but she holds up a hand, and it pauses, zooms in, keeps broadcasting. Her words will be carried across the galaxy but now she is only speaking to an audience of one. Ackbar looks at her, confused, this isn’t part of what they discussed. She’s deviating from her official remarks.

Leia has given everything to Alderaan, to the Alliance, the New Republic, and now the Resistance. But Han’s grief isn’t hers alone, there’s one other who understands, one other who’s grief is maybe even greater than her own.

“I speak now directly to my son.”

The crowd goes still. For her entire political career she always avoided making it personal, revealing her family affairs, her identity. But all of her New Republic critics are dead now, so what does it matter? Why shy away from it?

She can’t speak to him the way that she wants to, so this will have to do.

“Ben,” she says, her tone softer, now, staring directly into the lens of the cam droid, “we should have been there for you. We failed to protect you when Snoke began to invade your mind and that is a regret that I will always carry with me. I won’t make excuses because there are none to be made. You might call yourself by a different name now, but you are still my son. You will _always_ be my son, and I will love you until my last breath,” tears roll down her cheeks, unbidden. “Just as your father loved you until his.”

“I just want you to know that it is never too late for you to come home.”

The cam droid turns off at the nod of her head, and Leia turns to walk out of the woods, not saying a single word to the crowd in front of her.

* * *

Aboard the _Finalizer_ , Resistance leader Leia Organa's speech plays on repeat. The datapad’s screen is freshly cracked, having been thrown across the room in the owner’s fury. Her voice crackles, distorted from the damage, but her words are clear.

_“I will love you until my last breath.”_

The turmoil and rage comes off of Kylo Ren in waves, and his crackling red lightsaber becomes an extension of his wrath, tearing his private quarters to shreds with reckless abandon.

His brain pounds at the bickering voices in his head, the contradicting thoughts, the war playing out inside of him between the Dark and the Light. And Ben Solo, only a shell of a man _(but not dead, not gone)_ that Kylo keeps locked away, begins to claw to the surface.

* * *

The loss of his best friend is still a sharp wound in Chewie’s heart, so Rey is the one who brings Luke up to speed.They sit around a fire in Luke’s hut well into the evening, watching the sun on Ahch-To set through the little window and listening as the twig-like insects hum outside.

Throughout all of it, Luke is quiet. He lights the fire, feeds it until it is a quiet roar that radiates heat, cooks them a dinner of some roasted mystery meat and unrecognizable vegetables, and only sits down when there is nothing left to do. He keeps his expression largely unreadable, but Rey would be blind to not notice the way his hands shake and fists clench when she recounts the details of Han’s death and Kylo’s part in it.

She skips over her relationship to Kylo and their fight in the forest, not having fully unpacked the latter yet herself. Leia had mentioned that it would perhaps be prudent to not lead with her background, but to not wait too long before telling him the truth.

Rey follows the advice, especially because Luke seems like he might be looking for any excuse at all to turn her away.

Finally, she reaches the end of her tale, of Leia’s instruction to find him, to ask him to be her teacher, to bring him home.

She unclips the lightsaber from her belt again and sets it on the stone floor between them.

Luke looks at the lightsaber like it might burn him.

“I don’t train Jedi anymore,” he says after a time.

Rey doesn’t look away, doesn’t feel disappointed. “I never said I wanted to be a Jedi.”


	18. Something Better

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously, on a duel of destinies: Rey and Chewie find Luke, Leia holds a funeral for Han, ending it by directly addressing her son, and Kylo continues to unravel. Rey admits that she doesn't want to be a Jedi.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for descriptions of the long-term psychological effects of psychological/emotional/physical abuse and neglect. If you survived this, it will be kinda real for you. Rey's got some baggage in this one. Skip to "I had a dream about you" if you want to avoid!
> 
> !!!!!!!!!! BUT BEFORE YOU READ THIS CHAPTER !!!!!!!!!!!
> 
> I made some KEY changes to the first scene in chapter ten! You'll be kinda confused at the first part of this chapter if you haven't read that, so if you started this fic before today (July 8th, 2020) you're not gonna get the full effect. 
> 
> GO BACK AND READ (the updated) CHAPTER TEN, I promise y'all it's worth it.

Rey has always had trouble falling asleep. It wasn’t that she was always uncomfortable, no, she got used to sleeping on stone floors on Exegol as a child. Her punishments were frequent and _severe_. The Emperor had always considered her a disappointment, often faulted her for things entirely out of control.

She was never good enough.

No, Rey has always had trouble sleeping because her thoughts race. She’s constantly worrying about tomorrow, or running through hypothetical scenarios involving others. A frequent pastime as a child had been thinking through conversations with Palpatine well in advance, always rehearsing what to say, what wouldn’t make him angry. She thinks about the future to an almost obsessive degree.

And it’s the dark of night, when everything is quiet and all she can hear is her own breathing, that the loneliness creeps in. It’s suffocating. It wrenches her gut, feels like an ache in her soul, a pain in her lower back. She wants, desperately, for… _something_.

On the occasions where Rey had the luxury of both a bed _and_ blankets, she’d often ball the blankets up into some nebulous shape that she could drape herself over, entwine herself around. She’d sometimes stuff her clothes into it to make it stiffer, to feel more real. And she’d fall asleep cuddled next to a mass of fabric, knowing full well how pathetic it was but too desperate to stop herself.

The sad sight of an unloved little girl trying desperately to know what it’s like to be held. It makes her soul ache.

And it the loneliness hits her full force on Ahch-To, once Master Luke shows her to an empty hut and throws some blankets her way. Rey curls up on the cot that could maybe _just_ fit two, and the empty space around her, small though it is, feels overwhelming.

She clenches and unclenches her fists in the blankets, frustrated at herself, annoyed that she can’t just enjoy the second time she’s slept on anything approaching a real bed in _months_. She hates this, she hates feeling week and needy and vulnerable, hates that her time in that place left such a mark on her, left her with all of this _baggage_ when all she wants to do is carve the memories of it out of her brain with a knife.

And like a sick answer to her prayers, she feels that signature tingle in the air, the distinctive hum of the bond bridging an impossible distance to bring them together.

Minutes pass between them in complete silence.

Rey feels him looking at her, but doesn’t turn. And the words flow more freely from her when she isn’t looking at him, when she’s not confronted by his dark, intense stare.

“I had a dream about you before we met, you know.”

Kylo _(or should she call him Ben? She isn’t sure)_ doesn’t say anything, and she thinks that maybe he _knows_ , knows that it’s easier for her to talk to him like this, almost as if she can pretend he isn’t even there. The confession feels far less real, this way. She's never told him this, has never even acknowledged the dream's _existence_ out loud, it had felt too intimate for that, too personal. 

“We were,” she swallows, remembering it.

It had been a vision of a soft morning. She had been woken up in the dream by birdsong and this impossibly handsome man caressing her cheek, kissing her awake. She remembers blinking the heaviness of sleep out of her eyes and her heart bursting at the love she saw in his face, remembers gripping onto his shoulders and burrowing herself into his chest, breathing him in, her skin singing when he wrapped his arms around her to bring her closer.

They hadn't _done_ anything, he had just held her, combing his fingers through her hair, whispering sweet nothings in her ear. His kisses had been sweet and his touches almost painfully gentle. All he did was hold her close but it had been more than enough.

Rey couldn't remember ever being held like that, not once. 

And she had _sobbed_ at the loss of him once she’d woken up, had screamed into her mattress at the loss of the _love_ that had been in that dream. This man, this stranger, had held her like she was something precious, like he worshipped her. She had been sixteen at the time, sixteen and _desperately_ lonely and depressed, having fully accepted that she was never going to leave Exegol, that she was going to die on that wasteland of a planet, never having known what it was to love and be loved.

Rey had cursed the Force then for its cruelty, for showing her a life she’d never be able to have and wrenching it away with a snap of a finger.

“We were in this gorgeous house built into a hillside, surrounded by water. Where the mountains meet the sea. I’ve never seen _anything_ so beautiful,” she breathes softly. And she can hear his breath hitch behind her, feels it warm against her neck, but he’s still quiet.

“I woke up in the dream next to you in bed,” she says, and his next breath comes out stuttering, hotter still against her skin. “And you pulled me close and _kriff_ , the way you _held_ _me_ —“ she blinks back the tears in her eyes, the memory of it cutting her fresh all over again.

The torture of his loss had reached an impossibly high peak when she had met him for real, in-person, that day in the throne room. And the fantasies of the man she had only spent a few, precious moments with in that dream had been burnt into ashes, replaced by the painful truth of him. 

The loneliness feels sharper than it ever has, and she digs deeper, recognizes some of it as the bond’s work, the sharp pangs of _his_ loneliness beating against her mental shields in waves. And she allows herself to really consider for the first time in _years_ that maybe it hadn't all been one of Palpatine's tricks. Maybe the dream had been a vision of a future?

And she makes an impulsive choice, a desperate one. If she could just know, just once—

“Would it be okay if— _Gods_ , I— Would it be alright if you held me, just— just for tonight? I promise we can go right back to hating each other tomorrow, I just—”

She burrows her head into the blankets then and begs the earth to open up and swallow her whole immediately after the words leave her mouth. She opens her mouth to apologize, to sever the connection, and just as she opens her mouth to speak he says:

“Yes,” the answer coming a bit too fast after a pause, and it begins to sink in that he’s as full of yearning as she is. His tone is stiff, controlled. “Yes, that would be alright.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Rey says, swallowing. “Okay.”

She nods, then, and takes a deep breath to steel herself before turning around and nuzzling close to him, fisting her hands in the fabric of his shirt, pulling him close. He smells like sweat and whisperpine trees and bitter caf. The breathes him in deep, willing her thoughts to stop racing, but it’s off, somehow.

It’s better, it’s good, but not quite right. Not quite like it was in the dream. She curves one of her legs over his hip, drapes an arm around his neck and the other underneath it to draw him in more, but he’s stiff as a board as she positions herself, breathing in controlled breaths through his nose. _But it’s still not right,_ Rey thinks, _he’s not_ —

“You’re not holding me,” she mumbles, sleepy and frustrated that she’s doing all the work. “ _You need to hold me._ ”

He nods, stiff, and delicately places an arm over her waist like he’s touching a wild, deranged animal that has just now decided it wants to _cuddle_. His other arm sneaks under her, wrapping his fingers in her hair which is down, now, he’s just seemed to notice.

Rey sighs, burrows her face in the space between his neck and the pillow, breathing him in, and hums with satisfaction.

Kylo jerks at the feeling of her breath on his neck, the vibrations of her vocal chords on his skin, and tightens his grip on her waist, digs his hand into her hair.

 _Yes_ , the bond between sings, content. _Yes, yes, this is right._

It only takes seconds for her to fall asleep, wrapped up in warmth, feeling the heat of someone else’s skin against her cheek, smelling bitter caf and crisp whisperpine needles.

* * *

She snores.

They’re not loud, more of a sigh than a snore, if he had to classify it. Soft little sleepy noises right next to his ear that make his trousers threaten to tent. She’s wrapped around him like a baby Kowakian money-lizard, her grip on him only tightening once she’d fallen asleep.

 _This is low, even for you,_ Kylo thinks to himself, exerting an enormous amount of control to not get an erection from the sound of his wife _snoring_ , (even if they are the cutest noises he thinks he’s ever heard) and the feeling of her pressed up tight against him.

Involuntarily, his hand flexes at her waist, tightening just a fraction. Drawing her a little bit closer. She sighs when he does, burrowing her face even deeper into the side of his neck. _Kriff_ , and with this new position he can feel her lips on his skin, soft as spidersilk.

His thoughts threaten to race, the dozens of fantasies he has of her pouring into his mind like a dam breaking. In the months he hadn’t seen her, the months he had been chasing her, he had imagined countless scenarios of what would happen when he had her in his arms at last. Seeing her again on Jakku had only added fuel to the fire.

He’s imagined her naked, underneath him, passionate and wild, her fury boiling over into lust as she wrenches his lips onto hers—

And he’s imagined it softer, too. He had the same vision she had, of them waking up together in bed at his grandmother’s estate on Naboo. Only, from the way she had described it, he thinks his experience might’ve lasted a bit… _longer_. He had spent a good hour in the vision, becoming intimately familiar with the way her bare skin felt under his hands, the taste of her lips, the smell of her hair—

He had come out of it stiff and crazed, drunk on the way this beautiful woman, this complete stranger, had looked at him with utter devotion. Like he had meant something to her, like he had been important, _like she loved him_.

He tenses at what’s building in his trousers, pulling back slightly, moving away from Rey, not wanting her to feel his reaction.

But something must shock her awake wherever she is because Rey jolts up, scampering out of bed and away from him, and the bond thins and pulls them apart so fast it’s like an elastic that’s been stretched too thin and suddenly let go.

* * *

“General!” A scope monitor calls from the bridge pit of the _Finalizer_ , a _Resurgent-_ class Star Destroyer at the heart of the First Order’s formation above D-Qar. “We have a single Resistance X-wing fighter approaching. It’s moving to attack formation.”

“A single light fighter?” Asks Hux incredulously, peering into deep space like the answer will make itself clear if he looks hard enough. “What is this?”

“Well?” He says, shooting the gunners of the bridge an exasperated look, frustrated at their inaction. “Shoot him!”

But before the gunners can carry out the order, a ship-to-ship transmission crackles over the Finalizer’s speakers.

“Attention, this is Commander Poe Dameron of the Republic fleet,” the voice says. “I have an urgent communique for General Hugs.”

Hux feels all eyes turn his way, and his jaw tenses, red blooming on his cheeks all the way up to his ears. He knows the pilot’s name all too well. He swears that he’ll see the pilot on a torture rack one day soon, seeing to his interrogation _personally_. Ren’s superstitious sorcery had failed to extract any actionable intelligence, but Hux would prove himself the superior in time.

“Patch him through,” he snaps, tapping a foot impatiently.

The communications officer nods her head once at him, signaling that the connection has been made.

“This is General Hux of the First Order,” he begins imperiously. He preens like the pilot can see him, a sneer on his face. “The Republic is no more. Your fleet are rebel scum and war criminals. Tell your precious princess there will be no terms. _There will no surrender_.”

His lips twitch at that last part, cataloguing it away for later. He quite likes that line. Perhaps he'll reuse it later, as all the Rebels he'll encounter today will die anyway, and those under his command wouldn't _dare_ mention it. 

Dameron, to Hux’s bafflement, doesn’t reply. A pause. “Hi… I’m holding for General Hugs?”

“ _This_ is Hux. You and your friends are doomed! We will wipe your filth from the galaxy!”

Another pause, then a reply: “… I’m still holding.”

“What?” Hux looks around in consternation. “Hello?”

He glowers at the communications officer. “Can he hear me?”

She nods gravely.

“Hugs— with an H?” Dameron asks, seemingly oblivious. “Skinny guy, kinda pasty? Gives off the vibe of having some serious daddy issues?”

Hux gapes, his blood boiling.

“Look, I can’t hold forever,” Dameron continues, sounding exasperated. “If you reach him, tell him I have an urgent message for him. About his mother.”

Hux can hear something else in the transmission, like an electronic chuckle.

“I believe he’s messing with you, sir,” Captain Peavey says from his right. Hux shoots him a withering glare, and finds that the man’s face is a careful expressionless mask, as is the face of every other soul on the bridge.

 _They’re resisting the urge to laugh at me,_ he realizes. And he brings his fist down on the nearest console, screaming, his face flaming red, “Open fire!”

* * *

“Why don’t you want to be a Jedi?” Master Luke asks, and Rey’s a bit out of breath from the long hike to the top of the mountain, but the older man beside her seems completely unflappable, if a bit surly.

They’re standing in the center of a large, circular room, carved into the mountain. The floor is an ancient, carved mosaic, reaching out in concentric circles from the small stone step in the center of the room.

He had woken her up at dawn and thrown a lightsaber her way, a simple thing with a yellow blade, she could feel the difference of it in her hands, knew it wasn’t as capable of damage as the old lightsaber she has stashed in her things, the one he still refuses to touch.

Rey takes a breath. “I… don’t want to offend you, Master Luke.”

His lips quick up into a ghost of a smile, eyes twinkling. He raises an eyebrow. “I assure you,” he says. “I won’t be offended."

“The first line of the Jedi code is ‘there is no emotion; there is peace’, right?” Rey says, to which Luke gives the smallest of nods to, affirming her statement. “I don’t agree with it, and I wouldn’t be able to agree to a life that discourages emotional attachments, that makes me deny my feelings.”

Luke paces around her, appraising. “Explain,” he says.

Rey hasn’t told him everything yet, she knows she needs to, and she will, but in the meantime… “I’ve spent too much of my life feeling alone. Finding someone to spend my life with is something I’ve always wanted, and—“ she steels herself, stiffening her shoulders, afraid of what he’ll think. “I’m not ashamed of that. I refuse to believe that love is a path to evil.”

She feels him prod, just gently, at her thoughts. She feels it, stifles her knee-jerk reaction to shut him out, and instead forcibly relaxes, letting him just skim the surface of her thoughts.

The most dangerous thing he could potentially find, what had transpired between her and his nephew, is locked away somewhere private, in the same place she had put her memory of the map.

“Love makes people do stupid, irresponsible things,” he starts. “Love caused my father and countless other Jedi, to fall to the dark side.”

She steels herself for the lecture, knows that there’s more to this story—

“But,” Luke continues. “It also brought him back.”

Rey looks up sharply, surprised at his sudden shift.

“There’s a reason I don’t take padawans, that I don’t train people to become Jedi. I don’t believe in the Jedi Order anymore, because _you’re right,_ Rey. Denying emotion, suppressing an essential part of yourself, _that’s_ the path to the dark side. And the Jedi Order never understood that, and that’s why their ways need to end.”

Luke looks at her, head tilted, a satisfied look in his eyes. “I won’t train you to be a Jedi, I’ll train you to be something _better_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout to GreyForceUser (ReyandKyloforever) for guessing that Kylo had a vision of Rey before they met on Exegol! 
> 
> Sorry about me reworking previous chapters a bit, but some ideas are too good not to use. I hope it doesn't have to happen again, but it might just have to be the price we pay for me not taking the whole fic down and rewriting. Thank you guys in advance for being understanding!


	19. Author's Note

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An update on where this fic is going and a timeline for it's completion

Hello everyone! Thank you so much for sticking around and giving this fic love even though I've been away from it for several months. I'm totally fine, health-wise, but the stress of my last year of college (amidst everything else) has taken its toll. I've not stopped writing this fic, but I've increasingly grown frustrated with my lack of foresight in the beginning, and there are lots of aspects of this that I would change if I could do it over. 

That leads me to the main news of this new update. I've decided to re-write this fic so we spend more time learning about Rey and Kylo's time on Exegol before her escape. I intend to start off the fic right before the flashback where they meet for the first time. I've already started writing this new version and plotting things out. I want to have at least 10-20k words written before the first chapter is posted, so that there is less of a big gap in uploads in the future. I'm hoping this new version will be more fleshed out, more original, and give me room for writing more character development. The Rey we see in this fic is very different than how she started out on Exegol.

This is going to be a really big endeavor! But I love this fic and have no intentions of giving it up. 

My rough estimate for the first chapter going up is sometime in late December to early January. With any luck, all ~100,000 words of the new version will be up this time next year. 

If any of you are interested in beta reading or have things you'd love to see in the new version, please comment down below! Many of the reasons I wanted to start fresh is because there are so many comments from all of you that I wanted to better incorporate.

All my love, 

ObviouslyAnonymous


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